Eutelsat Signs Another Deal as it Looks to Fill Ka-Sat Before Operations Begin

[Satellite TODAY Insider 04-05-11] Eutelsat signed a Ka-Sat capacity deal with French Internet service provider Sat2Way, Eutelsat’s second agreement within a week, the operator announced April 5.
    The four-year contract, worth an initial 4 million euros ($5.7 million), will see Eutelsat distribute its Tooway new-generation broadband service on the Ka-Sat satellite to Sat2Wat starting in mid-2011. Sat2Way will use the capacity to offer its customers a range of Tooway packages with broadband speeds of up to 10 Mbps.
    "We have consistently believed in the market for satellite Internet and are convinced that consumer broadband services using Ka-band frequencies represent a compelling offer. Sat2Way selected Tooway as soon as it was available because Skylogic proposed a long-term strategy using Hot Bird 6 in advance of Ka-Sat. The economic model of Ka-Sat now positions us to offer a highly competitive range of broadband services to consumers in France, Belgium and Spain who are unable to access the Internet via terrestrial networks," said Sat2Way Founder Stéphane Ruelle.
    The Sat2Way deal follows a five-year, 3 million euro ($4.3 million) contract Eutelsat inked with German company SkyDSL on March 29 to market next-generation Tooway services provided by Ka-Sat.
    Ka-Sat was launched in December with a capacity of more than 70 Gbps and since then, Eutelsat has been pushing capacity contracts to fill the satellite by the time it comes into service in mid-2011. The complete Ka-Sat infrastructure comprises the satellite and a network of eight gateways across Europe connected to the Internet via a fiber backbone ring.
    One of the challenges for Eutelsat will be to see how it can monetize strong broadband market opportunities in Europe, according to Idate Satellite Analyst Maxime Baudry. "There are still 10 million Europeans which don’t have access to broadband. This is particularly the case in countries such as Italy, Germany, Poland or Romania," she said. "Even if people are covered, a majority of them have access to a limited broadband connection of only 1 or 2 Mbps, preventing them from having access to IPTV. In Germany for instance, 80 percent of the rural population had access to less than 2 Mbps in 2010 according to our findings. In Poland, it was 90 percent of the population that had less than 2 Mbps, so we think in all cases satellite broadband is expected to develop at a fast pace in Europe. Idate forecasts around 700,000 subscribers by 2015 in this zone."

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Eutelsat Signs Another Deal as it Looks to Fill Ka-Sat Before Operations Begin

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