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Eutelsat's Ka-Sat satellite goes into service, provides broadband to 13 million homes across Europe
Europe's already extensive broadband coverage may be expanding even further, now that Eutelsat's Ka-Sat satellite has officially gone into service. The new craft, which launched from Kazakhstan in late December, uses spotbeam technology to generate areas of connectivity that are about 250 kilometers wide, with each beam carrying a total capacity of 900Mbps. Unlike the Hylas 1, its reach will extend far across the continent, providing Tooway's high-bandwidth services to 13 million households in remote locations. Subscribers will have download speeds of up to 10Mbps and upload rates of 4Mbps, though they'll still have to put up with latency on the order of 250ms, making life even more difficult for Eastern European OnLive gamers. Of course, this access won't come for free, but Ka-Sat's 82-beam network structure significantly lowers its operating costs, allowing Eutelsat to offer prices that are on par with market rates. According to company CEO Michel de Rosen, customers should expect to pay around €30 for basic service, in addition to €250 they'd have to spend on a 77cm satellite dish. That's not necessarily a small amount of cash for low-income families to fork over, but at least they'll have an option that didn't exist before. Head past the break for a video about Tooway's Ka-Sat services, along with a full PR.
Comcast to offer Extreme 105Mbps broadband package starting in June?
We've had the megahertz and megapixels races, now how about a megabits per second contest? A Comcast customer has posted a note from his latest bill online, showing a new Extreme 105 service that will purportedly be launching on June 1. You'll need to obtain an Arris WBM760 cable modem to make it work, while also ponying up $249 for installation and $200 each month thereafter, but such is the price for sailing in the mostly unexplored 105Mbps downstream and 10Mbps upstream currents. Guess that will have to do until Google rolls out that gigabit fiber network later this year.
