The platform is expected to facilitate affordable Internet access for remote locations throughout Russia. GSS plans to offer satellite broadband access services to local internet service providers that will in turn supply services to consumers and enterprise customers within the Yamal-402 footprint, which covers the entire Russian territory. The Yamal-402 satellite has 46 Ku-band transponders to cover the majority of Russia, Europe, CIS, Africa and the Middle East.

   While the GSS network will use Ku-band through the Yamal-402 satellite, the terminals can be easily adapted to function with higher throughput Ka-band frequencies with no hardware adaptation to the modem and the antenna.

   The Yamal-402 telecommunications satellite launched in December of last year, but failed to reach its intended orbit after a failure of a pump bearing occurred during launch. Thales Alenia Space, which built the satellite for Russia’s Gazprom Space Systems, later lifted the satellite into its intended orbit using its onboard engines. However, the service life of the satellite will now be reduced from 15 to 11 years, due to emergency use of some of its fuel reserves.

   Gazprom Space Systems will launch its Yamal-401 by the end of the year, followed by its Yamal-601 spacecraft in 2015. The Yamal-401satellite will replace Gazprom’s Yamal-201 and Yamal-601 will replace the Yamal-202 respectively, joining the Yamal-300K spacecraft that was launched last year.

   The Yamal-300K satellite has a combined payload of eight active 72 MHz C-band transponders and 18 active 72 MHz Ku-band transponders to cover 95 percent of the Russian territory. The Yamal-300K was built by Russia’s Reshetnev space company and will be launched on November 3 using a Proton-M rocket from the Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan.

   Gazprom Space Systems plans to have the Yamal satellite network in full operation by 2020.