Tooway is now offering up to 10Mbps broadband via EutelSat's KA-SAT satellite

Eutelsat Communications announced at the beginning of June that its KA-SAT High Throughput Satellite had gone live, bringing broadband speeds of up to 10Mbps to homes across Europe.

The activation of the satellite means that consumers and business users can now gain access to speeds equivalent to ADSL2 DSL services regardless of their location. According to Eutelsat, at least 13 million European households are still beyond the range of ADSL, while 17 million households can only get speeds below 2Mbps, limiting the types of services they can access.

The company said that the KA-SAT satellite sports 82 narrow spotbeams that connect to 10 ground stations. This system enables frequencies to be reused 20 times and has a total throughput of 70Gbps. KA-SAT offers a significant upgrade to Eutelsat’s Eurobird 3 satellite, which was only capable of providing 2Mbps downlink.

“The entry into service of KA-SAT, the world’s most powerful spotbeam satellite, turns a new page in affordable and immediately available IP solutions, and places Europe at the forefront of high-capacity satellite technologies that can serve to quickly close the broadband gap,”  said Michel de Rosen, Eutelsat’s CEO in a statement. “We look forward to working with our service and technology partners to unleash the huge potential of this new pan-European wireless infrastructure.”

The service is available to end users via Eutelsat’s Skylogic affiliate Tooway. It provides a range of four standard packages via local country specific distributors offering speeds between 6-10Mbps for download and 1-4Mbps for upload with corresponding data allowances. In the UK, the top package (10Mbps down/4Mbps up) costs £99 a month, with a 25GB data allowance on a 24-month contract. The cheapest UK package at £24.99 a month offers 6Mbs download and 1Mbs up, with a 4GB cap.

A home install provides consumers with a small 77cm satellite dish and a modem that connects to a Mac or PC via Ethernet. Eutelsat said that the system can also meet the demands of professional users and deliver up to 40Mbps down and 10Mbps up, with 50Mbps down and 20Mbps upgrades on the way. Eutelsat suggested that its service would be well suited for newsgathering agencies with lightweight portable antennas providing uplink.

The Broadband World Forum will  take place on 27th-29th September at the CNIT, La Defense, Paris, France.

Solaris confirms faulty satellite

European satellite operator Solaris Mobile, which is owned by Eutelsat Communications and SES Astra, said that it has filed an insurance claim over the faulty satellite launched on April 3.

Solaris, along with Inmarsat, was awarded spectrum in the 2GHz S-band by the European Commission in May to offer satellite-based media and communications services across the 27 member states of the European Union.

Both providers are likely to have a particular focus on rural customers that are ill-served by existing fixed and wireless offerings and will deliver TV, location-based services, video and radio and internet connectivity.

However, Solaris ran into trouble soon after launch, with the W2A satellite suffering an “anomaly” affecting the unit’s capability to provide services.

This week the company said that an investigation of the satellite’s payload confirmed “significant non-compliance from its original specifications,” resulting in the filing of a claim for the full insured value of the payload.

Solaris also said that the technical findings suggest that the company should be able to offer some, but not all of the services it was planning to offer.

Europe gets satellite services off the ground

The European Commission this week designated two providers to offer satellite-based media and communications services, allocating Inmarsat and Solaris Mobile spectrum in the 2GHz S-band.

Under the EC award announcement, Inmarsat has been awarded 30MHz of S-band radio spectrum to run its satellite programme, known as EuropaSat, across the 27 member states of the European Union.

Solaris Mobile, which is owned by Eutelsat Communications and SES Astra, received a similar amount of spectrum. Both providers are likely to have a particular focus on rural customers that are ill-served by existing fixed and wireless offerings and will deliver TV, location-based services, video and radio and internet connectivity.

But Solaris has already run into trouble. It has confirmed that the W2A satellite, which it launched on April 3, is suffering an “anomaly”, which may affect the satellite’s capability to provide services.

Earlier this month Eutelsat introduced a satellite-based consumer internet service in the UK using the Ku-band of spectrum. Catering for consumers in rural areas, Eutelsat’s Tooway service offers 2Mbps internet connectivity on the downlink and 256Kbps on the uplink for £29.99 per month.

However, the satellite operators may get competition from traditional mobile players in the rural areas as the EC goes about addressing the issues of 2G spectrum refarming.

According to research house Analysys Mason this week, the refarming of 2G spectrum will be key to enabling mobile broadband coverage outside major population centres.

Liberalising the usage of the 850/900MHz frequency bands, in which 2G services, such as GSM, currently operate, is a significant emerging trend, which will extend the reach of 3G services to rural areas not covered by operators’ existing 2100MHz 3G networks.

“Cost-effective coverage of large, thinly populated land masses is the key benefit of introducing UMTS in the 850MHz or 900MHz bands,” said Catherine Viola, senior analyst at Analysys. At lower frequencies, radio signals propagate further, meaning that fewer sites are needed for network rollout. At 900MHz, for example, networks can be built and operated with cost savings of around 50-70 per cent compared with networks deployed in 2100MHz core-band 3G spectrum, Analysys claims.

UMTS900 networks have already been launched successfully in Europe, Asia Pacific and South America, by DNA and Elisa in Finland, Síminn in Iceland, Optus in Australia, Vodafone in New Zealand, AIS in Thailand and Digitel in Venezuela.

Eutelsat prepares to unwire UK

European satellite operator Eutelsat Communications did its bit for ‘Broadband Britain’ this week, introducing a satellite-based consumer internet service in the UK.

Catering for consumers in rural areas, Eutelsat’s Tooway service offers 2Mbps internet connectivity on the downlink and 256Kbps on the uplink  for £29.99 per month.

The company will deliver services via a network of distributors, which will be free to offer IPTV and VoIP telephony services using the same equipment.

Local distributors include Bentley Walker Satellite Internet Solutions, Avonline in Bristol, Satellite Solutions Worldwide in Oxfordshire and Remote Data Services in Perthshire, Scotland. The company already has satellite-based operations running in 20 European countries including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Ireland.

Tooway operates in the Ku-band of spectrum in the UK, and is delivered via Eutelsat’s own Eurobird 3 satellite In 2010, Eutelsat said it will expand the service with internet access up to 10Mbps, following the launch of a new satellite, KA-SAT, which claims to have the combined capacity of 40 traditional satellites.