Feel the bandwidth. Those who live in out-of-the way places in the UK and the rest of Europe, and who have been feeling digitally deprived, now have a new friend in the sky.
This week saw the entrance into commercial service of
Ka-Sat, a six-tonne telecommunications spacecraft dedicated to providing broadband internet to consumers and businesses across the continent.
Operated by Paris-based Eutelsat, the platform joins the fray with London-based
Avanti's Hylas-1 spacecraft, which came on stream just a few weeks ago.
The pair are the first net-dedicated satellites for Europe and should make quite a difference to the "not-spot" problem. Not-spots, if you were wondering, are those places where it has not been possible to get decent net connectivity via terrestrial solutions - fibre, ADSL, 3G, 4G, etc. It's a significant issue.
