Ka-Sat during electromagnetic testing in Astrium facilities.
Photo courtesy of Astrium

...Eutelsat Communications (Euronext Paris: ETL) demonstrated its unique capacity to deliver massive data bandwidth to multiple sites, allowing real time video monitoring of over 12,600 polling stations. During election day and the following night, KA-SAT managed 25,000 simultaneous videostreams, representing total throughput of 2.5Gbps. This is the equivalent of a fully loaded medium-capacity satellite but only a fraction of the total 90Gbps available via KA-SAT.

Datagroup, a leading service provider for data communications and a longstanding Eutelsat partner, selected KA-SAT to ensure that one in three polling stations in the Ukraine was able to transmit webcam recordings on behalf of the Ukraine’s Central Election Commission. Following this experience, Datagroup announced in Kiev that it will use KA-SAT to launch consumer broadband services across the Ukraine from 1 December.

Over a record four weeks leading up to the election, more than 12,600 KA-SAT terminals were deployed by Datagroup and activated on the KA-SAT network at an average pace of 500 terminals a day. This significant effort was achieved thanks to the easy installation of KA-SAT terminals that are already used by thousands of consumers across Europe for the Tooway broadband service. The network performance during the elections outperformed all Datagroup’s expectations, enabling observers to monitor video streams on the Internet in real time.