Forthnet Group, Greece’s leading private broadband and pay-TV service provider (under the NOVA brand name), has expanded its longstanding commercial relationship with Eutelsat Communications (Euronext Paris: ETL). A five-year distribution agreement enabling Forthnet Group to market the new generation Tooway™ broadband service to users across Greece and Cyprus has been signed with Skylogic, Eutelsat’s broadband affiliate.
Tooway™ is provided by Eutelsat’s powerful KA-SAT High Throughput Satellite, a new wireless broadband infrastructure for Europe. Eutelsat and Forthnet Group have in parallel entered into a broader commercial agreement to ensure future satellite capacity for NOVA at Eutelsat’s flagship HOT BIRD™ video neighborhood in order to launch new premium services and accelerate the acquisition of payTV subscribers. With these new contracts, Forthnet Group will be the first operator in Europe to bundle the Tooway™ broadband service with its pay-TV portfolio in order to offer users triple-play services through a single satellite dish and a single subscription.
Satellite broadband, with download speeds of up to 10 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 4 Mbps, together with VOIP, will start to be commercialized in Q4 2011 and offered in combination with NOVA payTV. The full service will be delivered via Tooway antennas equipped with a dual-feed in order to access broadband from the KA-SAT satellite and NOVA from the HOT BIRD™ satellites. According to a public consultation for the report “White Areas of Greece for 2011” published by the Ministry of Regional Development and Competitiveness for the Digital Agenda, Greece represents a significant market opportunity for satellite broadband. Despite deployment of terrestrial broadband, there are still more than 800,000 unserved citizens in Greece, which ranks 23rd of the EU27 member states in terms of broadband penetration.