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Tag Archive for 'Eutelsat'

Eutelsat’s TooWay satellite broadband service launches in the UK at £29.99/m for 2Megs

May 1, 2009 by Barry Flynn

As a quick update to our previous post on Eutelsat’s launch of its broadband-by-satellite service, Tooway, to France, the service has now been launched in the UK, where it will compete head-to-head against the rival SES Astra service, Astra2Connect.

Cost for the service will begin at £29.99 a month, offering 2MBit/s downstream. Although the Astra service delivers a lower tier at a lower price (256KBit/s at £19.99/m), its 2MBit/s service would cost £74.99/m, over twice as much as the Eutelsat one.

Posted in Asides, Broadband and Digital Satellite. 0 Comments

Eutelsat French freesat offer FRANSAT launches against TNTSat in June

April 8, 2009 by Barry Flynn

So - Eutelsat has finally broken its silence about its role in the creation of a second French Freesat platform. The Eutelsat free-to-air satellite platform will launch in June, dubbed ‘FRANSAT’ - in competition with the Canal Plus-operated SES Astra-delivered TNTSat.

As we noted here, it was something of a mystery why Eutelsat, which has traditionally offered analogue re-transmission via Atlantic Bird 3 at 5° West degrees to France’s terrestrial blackspots, had kept so quiet about its plans to convert this installed base to digital - and left it so long. As a result, SES Astra has made hay while the sun shines, and its TNTSat service now claims around a million customers.

In a press release this morning, Eutelsat notes that the majority of France’s 18 free-to-air DTT channels are already transmitting from Atlantic Bird 3: by simply buying new kit comprising a digital decoder and access card, existing homes with dishes pointing to this location will be able to pull in the complete DTT offering in two months’ time, including the four HD DTT channels (TF1 HD, France 2 HD, Arte HD and M6 HD) which began broadcasting last autumn.

On sale for €99 euros, the non-proprietary FRANSAT decoders will be available at retail from multiple suppliers.

On the face of it, the offer is an attractive one for those analogue Atlantic Bird subs who have not already elected to take the rival TNTSat service, since customers will not have to pay to have their dishes re-aligned from the Eutelsat bird to the SES Astra one. The question is - how many of those homes are left?

Posted in Digital Satellite. 1 Comment

Ofcom cripples ICO’s EU S-Band bid, recommends ITU to cancel previous 2GHz assignments

February 27, 2009 by Barry Flynn

The fortunes of the Solaris Mobile project - the JV between satellite operators Astra and Eutelsat which seeks to create a market for mobile satellite services across Europe - received a boost today with an announcement from UK regulator Ofcom that it planned to write to the ITU to recommend cancellation of rival operator ICO’s previous assignments in the S-Band.

In a short statement, the regulator said:

“Following a review of the status of the deployment of the ICO-P mobile satellite system conducted over a three year period involving extensive consultation with ICO Global Communications (ICO), and having carefully considered the representations made by ICO, Ofcom has taken a decision that it will write to the ITU on 17 March to instruct that the ICO-P assignments currently recorded in the ITU Master Register be cancelled.”

Ofcom is responsible for ICO’s spectrum assignments because it is the ITU representative for the Cayman Islands, the offshore tax haven which ICO cites as its base for tax purposes.

Solaris Mobile has been confirmed as an ‘admissible candidate’ by the EC for the S-Band (2GHz) beauty contest, along with ICO Satellite Limited, Inmarsat Ventures Limited, and TerreStar Europe Limited.

The Eutelsat W2A satellite which Solaris plans to use was due to become operational in February 2009, enabling it to claim that it was the only one of the four able to meet “European Commission expectations that cross border Mobile TV services are likely to start in 2009.”

However, Eutelsat recently announced that W2A would be delayed, launching on 28th March.

ICO had previously laid claims to part of the S-Band for its own DVB-SH venture, on the basis of the past award of the frequencies to the company by the ITU. Indeed, in a recent SEC filing, ICO said that it had initiated proceedings in the European Court of First Instance seeking the annulment of the European Parliament decision that had engendered the EC S-Band contest, contending that the decision was illegal and should be annulled because of its own prior claim.

If the ITU now agrees with the Ofcom recommendation, and cancels the ICO registration, those proceedings would now presumably fall, and ICO would have to win the EC beauty contest on its own merits.

As ConnectedTV has previously commented, Solaris Mobile is a firm favourite for the S-Band award, and the Ofcom decision has now served to strengthen that position.

Update 28/02/09

Overnight, ICO has responded furiously to the Ofcom move, saying that it takes “strong exception” to the Ofcom statement, pointing out that ICO F2, the first orbiting satellite in the MEO constellation, was launched in June, 2001 and continues to provide services in the S-Band. ICO goes on to say that its ITU S-Band registrations were the result of “having spent more than a decade and billions of dollars constructing an international satellite system, as well as its continued efforts to further enhance its satellite system.”

ICO added that it had “recently prevailed in a significant legal action against the Boeing companies regarding the fraudulent activity, breach of contract and tortious interference which caused the delays related to the deployment of the remainder of the system. ICO is continuing to defend its international legal rights, including through participation in international regulatory organizations and litigation.”

In other words, the satellite operator is not about to drop its case before the European Court of First Instance, even if Ofcom has just holed it below the water-line.

Posted in Broadband and Digital Satellite. 1 Comment

Eutelsat announces French rival to Astra’s broadband-by-satellite service

February 4, 2009 by Barry Flynn

Having recently given over some editorial space to a consideration of Astra’s broadband-via-satellite solution, Astra2Connect, it seems only fair to mention Eutelsat’s rival version, Tooway, whose launch I attended at IBC in 2007.

This week Eutelsat announced that it had launched the service in France through partners Numeo and Sat2Way at ‘no more than €35/month, equipment included.’

The price-point is significant, since it meets the government’s expectation in its updated France Numérique 2012 plan (NB, PDF) that any household in the country, wherever it is located, should be able to access broadband at speeds above 512KBit/s for €35/m or less.

The Tooway service claims to deliver downstream speeds to users’ PCs of 2MBit/s coupled with an upstream rate of 384KBit/s.

To access the service, consumers will require a dish and modem, which are included in the monthly subscription fee proposed by Numéo and Sat2Way.

Repeating a suggestion noted in the Astra2Connect post, Eutelsat is claiming that service-providers could use Tooway “to build triple-play offers combining Internet access, Voice over IP and IPTV channels” - the IPTV claim in particular being one that Connected TV is sceptical about.

Nevertheless, the price of the Eutelsat service compares advantageously to Astra2Connect’s - if that is, it really does offer 2MBit/s. To get that service-level, UK users of the Astra service would have to fork out £74.99 a month, the kit would cost £299, and installation a further £100. Moreover, the Astra service only supports an upstream rate of £128KBit/s.

Eutelsat’s announcement says that in Europe, Swisscom, Switzerland’s national telecommunications operator, the ISP Fastweb in Italy and Telecable and Distecable in Spain have already selected Tooway to extent broadband access.

Tooway currently uses Ka-band capacity on Eutelsat’s HOT BIRD 6 satellite, but in 2010 the operator will deploy a new satellite infrastructure to support the service’s widescale deployment throughout Europe.

Eutelsat says this will offer performance levels comparable to ADSL-2, with speeds to the user of 10 MBit/s downstream.

Posted in Broadband. 1 Comment

SES Astra’s Astra2Connect service to use satellite to bridge UK’s broadband gaps

January 28, 2009 by Barry Flynn

The potential universe for broadband access via satellite in the UK could be as high as 800,000 households, according to Mike Locke, the man in charge of VSAT, Internet & Special Projects at satellite equipment distributor Eurosat.

Speaking yesterday at a UK launch event for satellite operator SES Astra’s Astra2Connect two-way broadband satellite product, Locke said that while BT estimated there were 100,000 UK homes which would never get ADSL, with Ofcom reckoning a higher figure of 200,000, private research calculated there was a much higher figure of around 800,000 homes with a poor broadband connection. “The true figure [for the potential market] is somewhere in between,” said Locke.

Mike Chandler, managing director of Astra UK, was at pains to point out that the Astra2Connect service, for which Eurosat is the UK distributor, was intended to be complementary to terrestrial broadband, not in competition with it. It was neither as cheap nor as fast, Chandler conceded: what the product sought to do was “to bridge the gap for people unable to get broadband.”

The Astra2Connect proposition is tiered by speed, with 4 service-levels available between 256KBit/s and 2MBit/s downstream, ranging from £19.99/m to £74.99/m. Upstream speeds to the satellite (Astra 1E/3A at 23.5oE) range from 64KBit/s to 128KBit/s. The kit, including the dish, special LNB and satellite modem, is priced at £299.99, with a current install offer of £100. Given the proximity of Astra1E/3A to the UK-focussed Astra2 series at 28.2oE, the dish is also able to receive BSkyB or Freesat satellite channels.

The service is already available in Europe, and currently has close to 50,000 customers, said Chandler, with the most popular tier being the 1MBit/s one.

The service was demonstrated live at the event, and successfully coped with embedded video streamed from Internet websites. The opportunity to test how the BBC i-Player might perform was not available, though, due to the fact that the range of IP addresses assigned to the service are currently Luxembourgeois ones, which are automatically barred from access by the BBC.

Locke maintained that the true performance speed in the packages matched the advertised one very closely, and produced a graph demonstrating an average download speed of around 800/900KBit/s for a four-day test of the 1MBit/s service. This compared very favourably with similar tests carried out on terrestrial broadband packages, he said.

The Lyngsat website shows the Astra2Connect service occupying three transponders at 23.5oE, potentially offering a throughput of 40MBit/s each, according to Chandler. A fair use policy for the service was deployed to ensure that actual speeds matched advertised ones as closely as possible.

As for future developments, a VoIP service is in the pipeline, but there are no intentions to use the service to deliver IPTV. Both Chandler and Locke suggested it would make little commercial sense to do so given the ability of the installation to offer hundreds of satellite TV channels alongside a broadband service.

The Astra approach contrasts with rival satellite operator Eutelsat’s claims that it will be able to use its forthcoming Ka-Band capacity to offer IPTV as a possible service.

Connected TV is sceptical about such claims given a true IPTV service’s requirement to devote around 1.5MBit/s to each active customer, which would very rapidly use up available transponder capacity and would be very expensive to deliver.

However, using satellite as a fill-in broadband service for those forced otherwise to rely on dial-up Internet access seems a reasonably attractive option given the sort of prices Astra is charging. Previously, the customer premises equipment required for satellite broadband was in the £600-700 range.

The service could face problems if it becomes very popular, however, since if using the same number of transponders, Astra would gradually need to tighten its fair use policy. This could be solved by bringing additional transponders onstream, but the question then becomes to what extent do you allow service levels to deteriorate before adding the additional capacity.

Posted in Broadband, IPTV, Research and TV-over-Internet. 1 Comment