The satellite operator will sell its retail assets to an as yet unnamed buyer
The French satellite operator, Eutelsat, is to exit the European retail broadband business, selling its retail assets to an undisclosed private satellite operator.
Those assets include its affiliate Bigblu Operations: Eutelsat acquired the BBB Europe broadband platform from Bigblu Broadband in 2020 for €38 million. Through the deal it also gained access to the network of installers and resellers, and 50,000 subscribers across France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Poland, Portugal and the UK.
Eutelsat will have a wholesale-only model to provide satellite broadband capacity across Europe. It has substantial wholesale deals for its the Eutelsat KONNECT satellite with Orange in France, TIM in Italy, Hispasat in Spain and Swisscom in Switzerland.
More capacity and a merger
Eutelsat’s KONNECT VHTS is due to come into service soon. It has 230 beams over Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Ka-band capacity of 500Gbps. This can be adjusted to meet demand and each country’s specific needs. The picture shows the EUTELSAT KONNECT VHTS satellite entering a thermal vaccum chamber at Thales Alenia Space for pre-launch testing.
Eutelsat is in the midst of merging with the wholesale-focused low Earth orbit (LEO) operator OneWeb. Earlier this month the two demonstrated a multi-orbit connectivity solution to NATO at Eutelsat’s teleport facility in Rambouillet, France.
They linked to OneWeb’s LEO constellation via a Kymeta Hawk u8 user terminal, mounted on a 4×4 Land Rover Discovery. They streamed 4K video feeds and ran Teams, Twitch and GoogleEarth applications at 195Mbps download speeds, upload speed of 32Mbps and latency as low as 70ms.
OneWeb and Eutelsat also demonstrated a handover between beams and satellites to transfer a 1GB file in under 8 seconds.