Ka-Sat net-dedicated spacecraft ready for launch

bealtine

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12065466

Ka-Sat net-dedicated spacecraft ready for launch

Europe is about to get a second satellite dedicated to delivering broadband internet connections.

The six-tonne Ka-Sat will be launched atop a Proton rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan in a flight expected to last nine hours and 12 minutes.

The Eutelsat-operated spacecraft will concentrate its services on customers in the so-called "not-spots" of Europe.

It is estimated that tens of millions of households in these areas cannot get a decent terrestrial connection.

Ka-Sat will provide homes with speeds generally up to 10Mbps.

Lift-off from Baikonur is timed for 0351 local time on Monday (2151 GMT on Sunday).

The spacecraft follows the Hylas-1 platform into orbit. This satellite, operated by Avanti Communications of London, was launched just last month.

Ka-Sat, however, is considerably bigger, and has a notional capacity to serve up to two million households compared with Hylas's 300,000.

Nevertheless, such is the scale of the under-served market in Europe that both platforms should be very profitable ventures, the two companies believe.

"As many as 30 million households in Europe are not served at all or get high mediocrity of service," said Eutelsat CEO Michel de Rosen.

"These could be people in the countryside or in the mountains, sometimes not very far from large cities. Ka-Sat is an answer to that problem," he told BBC News.

Paris-based Eutelsat is one of the world's big three Fixed Satellite Services (FSS) companies, and transmits thousands of TV channels across its fleet of spacecraft.

It already provides some internet capability on its existing platforms, but Ka-Sat is its first broadband-dedicated endeavour.
High throughput

Ka-Sat will be positioned about 36,000km above the equator at nine degrees east.

Its communications payload, structure and propulsion system were prepared by EADS Astrium at its UK facilities in Stevenage and Portsmouth.

Final testing of the spacecraft took place at Astrium's factory in Toulouse, France, before shipment to Baikonur.

Ka-Sat has a total throughput of some 70Gbps.

This will be channelled via 82 spot beams on to different market areas stretching from North Africa to southern Scandinavia. A very small segment of the Middle East will also be reached.

Eutelsat has signed about 70 deals with distributors across the satellite's "footprint", and more would be signed over the next year, said Mr de Rosen.

"It takes normally a few weeks for a satellite to become operational after launch," he explained.

"In this case, it is more likely to be a few months. Expect Ka-Sat to be operational in the second half of the second quarter of 2011."
Previous failure

Ka-Sat's Proton rocket will be under the spotlight for this launch.

The Russian vehicle failed on its last outing four weeks ago, dumping three Glonass satellite-navigation spacecraft in the Pacific Ocean.

An inquiry found the Proton's new Block DM-03 upper-stage had been over-fuelled, making it too heavy to achieve its required performance.

International Launch Services (ILS), which runs the commercial operations of the Proton vehicle, will be using a different upper-stage for the Ka-Sat mission.

This Breeze M stage has a good recent record.

It will be the eighth and last ILS-organised Proton mission of 2010.

watty

They may have been over optimistic building 70Gbps of Internet capacity. LTE and Fibre rollouts proposed since the build started dampen the prospects.

Hence they want more Niche deals like Saorsat http://www.saortv.info/satellite-saorsat/ and Digital Cinema Feeds. The Narrow service areas designed for increasing Internet capacity have side effect of allowing FTA TV on Satellite that normally would have to be encrypted.

http://www.techtir.ie/saortv/saorsat-coverage

See also http://www.ilslaunch.com/
and http://kasat.imgondemand.com/
http://www.ilslaunch.com/news-122210

Launch 9.51pm Web and Satellite feeds http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=69740483#post69740483

It's not expected to be Operational till end of April / Start of May.

Perhaps not a Coincidence that "Full Launch" date of Irish Digital appears to be May and they won't confirm May date or Info campaign details yet.

http://www.ilslaunch.com/ka-sat-mission-control

*Update*
OK so far...
http://www.techtir.ie/blog/watty/ka-sat-launch

watty

Final Separation at 7:03 am was success.

watty

Built for Eutelsat by Astrium using the Eurostar E3000 platform, KA-SAT ushers in a new generation of multi-spotbeam satellites. Its revolutionary concept is based on a payload with 82 narrow spotbeams connected to 10 ground stations. This configuration enables frequencies[/polarisation] to be reused 20 times and takes total throughput beyond 70 Gbps. The ground network will use ViaSat’s SurfBeam® technology, similar to the solution already powering broadband connectivity for almost 450,000 satellite homes in North America. The combination of KA-SAT’s exceptional capacity and ViaSat’s SurfBeam® technology will make it possible to deliver Internet connectivity for more than one million homes, at speeds comparable to ADSL.

KA-SAT will in particular boost to up to 10 Mbps the speeds of Eutelsat’s Tooway™ consumer broadband service, which has been operated since 2008 by its Skylogic affiliate. Tooway™ satellite antennas equipped with dual feeds will be able to benefit from broadband connectivity via KA-SAT and broadcast services delivered by satellites located up to 10 degrees from Ka-SAT’s 9° East location. By driving down terminal and transmissions costs, KA-SAT will also lower the barrier to entry for VSAT services for connecting enterprises, providing back-up for private networks, facilitating emergency communications and for transport markets. With each spotbeam delivering total capacity of 900 Mbps, shared between the forward and return paths, significant new resources will also be opened for services needing high throughput and quality that include regional television, newsgathering and connecting local networks to the Internet backbone.

The deployment of the KA-SAT programme, both in space and on the ground, will be pursued with three key phases prior to full entry into commercial service. The first phase comprises circularising the satellite’s orbit, with four firings of the apogee motor over the coming seven days. Once the satellite is on station at 9° East, it will undergo a series of in-orbit tests. This will be followed by the final phase of integrated validation of the satellite and ground stations before commercial entry into service, which is planned for end May 2011.

Via http://www.eutelsat.com/news/compress/en/2010/html/PR5910-KA-SAT-SUCCESS/PR5910-KA-SAT-SUCCESS.html

See also http://www.techtir.ie/saortv/saorsat-coverage

RTE's Saorsat TV would appear to be only using 1/9th to 1/10th the Irish Capacity of 450Mbps.
At 10Mbps and 48:1 contention is only 1,870 users in Ireland. Or about 11,000 Users at the higher 285:1 Contention

They claim 70GBps (up & down) and 1 Million user capacity. That would be a 285:1 contention ratio.

The only way that they can have larger numbers of customers is low cap.

However if they only get 1/10th the number of customers due to LTE, 3G/HSPA and new Fibre rollouts, then it will be quite good, barring the poor latency (> 700ms probably).