TOOWAY™ NOW CLOSING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE IN 22 EUROPEAN COUNTRIES
Selected by leading operators including Telecom Italia and Fastweb in Italy, El Corte Inglès in Spain, SBI/3 in Ireland and Hellas On line in Greece, Tooway™ has in one year more than doubled the availability of its broadband offer for the consumer public, going from 10 to 22 European countries.
In each of these countries, national and regional initiatives are multiplying in order for broadband to be accessible to homes beyond range of ADSL. For Tooway™ and its distributors these initiatives are creating market conditions that are particularly favourable for the development of public services. In France, Numeo and Sat2way have adapted their Tooway™ offers to match the speeds and price levels of the government plan “Digital France 2012”. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the Tooway™ service distributed by Bentley Walker, Avonline Ltd, Satellite Solutions Worldwide Ltd and Remote Data Services Ltd meets the conditions to satisfy the wide scale digitisation of rural areas recommended by Lord Carter in his white paper Digital Britain. TeleCable is following the same rationale in equipping rural homes in the Spanish province of Asturia; while Swisscom, the first national operator in Europe to commit to the principle of nationwide universal service, provides Tooway™ terminals to Swiss homes beyond range of terrestrial networks.
To transform satellite Internet access a mass market solution capable of resolving Europe's digital divide, Eutelsat has strengthened its partnership with ViaSat by pooling broadband ground technologies and innovative orbital resources.
For the terminals, by driving down the cost of hardware, the use of ViaSat’s Surfbeam® standard has made it possible to include equipment in monthly subscription costs, similar to models practised by mobile telephony or pay TV. In terms of bandwidth, the Tooway™ service is currently operating on Eutelsat’s two multibeam satellites, HOT BIRD™ 6 and EUROBIRD™ 3. The spectrum efficiency of a multibeam architecture facilitates subscriber speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps at prices similar to ADSL. The partnership between Eutelsat and ViaSat will enter a second phase after the launch of the KA-SAT satellite in the fourth quarter of 2010. This new-generation satellite will carry into orbit over 80 beams in the Ka-band. Through a ground infrastructure of eight stations connected to the satellite, from a few hundred thousand homes today, the number of homes able to connect to the Internet via a single satellite will go to over one million, at prices comparable to ADSL 2.
In the Saint-Ceré district council in the south west of France,
only two out of 13 municipalities are connected to ADSL.
Hilly landscape and farming activities have spread the local
population across plateaus and valleys. During the first
phase of a broadband deployment operation, almost 40
Tooway™ terminals were installed by Numéo. The district’s
goal is to cover the majority of homes in white areas in
order to preserve the habitat and to develop employment in
business parks where broadband is essential.
Public initiatives are
multiplying to ensure that
all homes have access
to broadband.
NEARLY 10 000 D-STAR TERMINALS ALREADY IN SERVICE
With 65% of its business in Africa and the Middle East, D-STAR offers broadband access to enterprises and local authorities. Progressing this year by 11%, this growth means that close to 10 000 public and private sites are connected to broadband via a D-STAR terminal which is totally independent from terrestrial networks.
Thanks to its ability to adjust speed according to applications and number of connected terminals, the D-STAR service is today available with a wide range of options adapted to specific markets, whether for local authorities and SMEs, industrial sites, itinerant worksites, ships at sea, off-shore platforms and high speed trains. For this last sector, and after a test period in early 2008, Eutelsat and its partners Alstom, Cap Gemini and Orange were selected to equip 52 SNCF high-speed trains of its East network with an Internet connection and a multimedia portal.
In other markets, in response to initiatives by service operators such as Horizon Satellite, Bentley Walker, Satxpro, Afrique Telecom and ComIP, D-STAR technology has been selected to ensure the surveillance of control valves on gas pipelines, equip itinerant worksites for railway construction projects, and provide connections between forest, farm and mining outposts and their bases. Nortis Telecom was notably selected to deploy D-STAR ter;inals in 470 schools in rural locations in Morocco within the framework of a far-reaching programme driven by the Education ministry to develop ICT facilities. To serve these markets, operators are associating permanent satellite capacity leased from Eutelsat with value-added services for administering and securing networks, voice over IP, video-conferencing and telemetry.
