The service offers connectivity speeds of up to 12 megabits-per-second (Mbps) downstream and up to 3 Mbps upstream, with price packages beginning at $50 per month. ViaSat Senior Vice President Tom Moore said that the service delivers a broadband experience similar to some of the fastest terrestrial broadband services for most applications.

   “With our new Exede broadband service, customers across the United States will have a way to get exceptional speed whether they live in a city, suburbs or a more rural area,” Moore said in a statement. “Our new Exede service speeds make us very competitive with wireless home broadband service, as well as legacy DSL and many cable services.”

   The path to launching Exede began in 2008, when ViaSat and Eutelsat announced that the two companies had ordered a pair of all Ka-band satellites under collaboration to develop more satellite broadband capacity. At the time, former Eutelsat Chairman and CEO of Giuliano Berretta described the plan as, “crossing a new frontier to a specifically designed infrastructure for interactive consumer services … for millions of homes in Europe and North America that will still be beyond range of terrestrial broadband networks in 2010.”

   ViaSat’s high-throughput, all Ka-band satellite ViaSat-1 was launched into orbit by International Launch Services (ILS) in October – almost 10 months after Eutelsat sent its own Ka-Sat satellite into space. “ViaSat-1 has been a complex and challenging project. The ViaSat-1 system, which includes the gateways and user terminals in addition to the satellite, is going to change the way people think about satellite broadband,” ViaSat CEO Mark Dankberg told Satellite TODAY Insider.

   Moore said the Exede service and its residential broadband packages include advanced web acceleration technology that was designed to, “provide a high-speed Internet web browsing experience through an evolving variety of techniques that go far beyond simple caching of web content, this new web acceleration technology quickly delivers pages, even on media and video intensive websites.”

   Among those techniques is a data allowance measure that ViaSat has put into place to ensure that a mix of speed and volume can be offered to a large segment of broadband users that would otherwise not have access to high-speed Internet service.

   ViaSat also is working with its airline partner JetBlue to create an in-flight broadband service for commercial aviation. That service is scheduled to launch by the end of 2012.