European satellite venture Eutelsat says it will work with the US ViaSat operation to bring satellite broadband to Europe. It was bad enough that Modern Times Group’s satellite DTH business in Northern Europe is also called ViaSat, but now both operations will be working in the same continent.
ViaSat has a lot of experience bringing satellite broadband directly to consumers in the US, and has partnered many of the US telcos to offer “out of footprint” broadband under the brand names of Wild Blue and more recently Exede. It also offers a dual installation service with DirecTV, where broadband and DirecTV service can be installed at the same time on the same dish. Dish Networks has recently emulated this with its own broadband and DTH TV.
What if ViaSat US, would partner ViaSat DTH and both of them could be installed at the same time by the same engineer, that wouldn’t be confusing at all. Luckily ViaSat in the Nordics uses the SES fleet of satellites so that
wouldn’t physically work.
Eutelsat says that its KA-SAT can deliver up to 22 Mbps per home and has attracted 190,000 homes around Europe since 2011, but the satellite can support up to 1 million broadband customers, so this deal is clearly to accelerate sales. The only recent developments for this satellite was that last February Telekom Austria signed a resale deal to offer satellite broadband across its footprint and is offering this from a single dish with triple play (voice and TV as well) using both KA-SAT and Eutelsat 16A.
Eutelsat gets some 60% of its revenue from delivering video (€229 million out of €387) and just €51 million last quarter from data, with the remainder coming from Government and value added services. But it has made a strong play into broadband, and has leased capacity on the AMOS-6 Ka-band satellite in partnership with Facebook in Africa and has commissioned another standalone High Throughput Satellite to serve the African market with broadband.
Michel de Rosen, Eutelsat Chairman and CEO, said: “ViaSat is a partner we both trust and value for its track record in setting industry standards and developing technologies that unlock broadband opportunities.”
The joint venture will break into a wholesale effort and a retail one, with ViaSat trying to sign partners for broadband delivery in Europe and the Mediterranean. Eutelsat will contribute its current European broadband business including the KA-SAT satellite. ViaSat will continue to provide selected broadband technologies for KA-SAT gateways and terminals and will acquire a 49% interest in the business for a €132.5 million.
For future capacity, the partnership will use a new ViaSat-3 platform, which ViaSat expects to bring into service in 2020. The retail side of the business will focus on building a direct-to-consumer ISP brand in Europe.