ASI, the Italian Space Agency has announced an agreement with Eutelsat Communications (Euronext Paris: ETL) to use the new KA-SAT High Throughput Satellite in order to develop broadband connectivity for public administrations in Italy. The agreement was signed by Enrico Saggese, President of ASI, and Arduino Patacchini, CEO of Skylogic, the Eutelsat affiliate that provides broadband services through KA-SAT.

Eutelsat's high-capacity KA-SAT infrastructure is a powerful new platform for extending broadband access to users beyond range of terrestrial networks. ASI is planning the progressive use of 550 Mbps of KA-SAT capacity across 10 spotbeams that together provide full coverage of Italian territory.

The capacity will mainly be deployed to deliver broadband to Italian public administrations beyond range of terrestrial networks so that the benefits of ICT can be extended to citizens located in previously underserved regions.

A Public Private Partnership will be set up by ASI with the private sector to deploy broadband services for Italian institutional and government entities. These will include the Tooway service, which is delivered through KA-SAT, and offers users broadband speeds of up to 10 Mbps downstream and 4 Mbps upstream.

In addition, ASI will cooperate with Skylogic to access KA-SAT and to define integration schemes between Tooway and the capacity that ASI foresees to have on its own satellites in the future.

Enrico Saggese, President of ASI, said: "ASI is looking carefully after the overall Italian satellite telecommunications strategy, with the objective of deploying state-of-the-art infrastructure to cover the needs of institutional customers. We think that exploiting the public-private partnership in this field will be very beneficial, for both the efficiency and the effectiveness of the relevant programmes.

"This agreement with Eutelsat and Skylogic is fully consistent with our objectives and opens wide cooperation perspectives, for the benefit of the Italian institutions and citizens."

Michel de Rosen, Eutelsat CEO, added: "This agreement with ASI is a new example of how our powerful and flexible KA-SAT infrastructure can be used to efficiently and quickly equalise access to the benefits of broadband.

"We are delighted to build this new relationship with Italy's National Space Agency, which is committed to exploiting the strengths of satellite telecommunications for increasing knowledge and developing a culture of high technology in Italy."

In service since May 2011, Eutelsat's high-capacity all Ka-band system, combining satellite and on-ground infrastructure, opens a new chapter in the market for satellite-based IP services.

Its revolutionary concept is based on a payload with 82 narrow spotbeams connected to 10 ground stations. This configuration enables frequencies to be reused 20 times and takes total throughput to beyond 70 Gbps.

The ground network uses ViaSat's SurfBeam 2 technology, an advanced version of the technology already powering broadband connectivity for 500,000 satellite homes in North America.

The combination of KA-SAT's exceptional capacity and SurfBeam 2 enables Internet connectivity to be delivered at speeds comparable to ADSL for more than one million homes in Europe and large parts of the Mediterranean Basin.