Moscow street with the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in the background. Photo: Flickr, Mariano Mantel.

Russian digital satellite television service NTV-Plus will start offering offer high-speed internet to its Direct-to-Home (DTH) TV subscribers across the European part of the Russian Federation. The company has selected the broadband service developed by Eutelsat Networks and powered by Gilat’s Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSATs) to operate the new service.

Gilat’s satellite solution leverages multi-beam high throughput capacity on the Express AMU1/Eutelsat 36C satellite, whose wide-beam capacity NTV-Plus already uses for TV broadcasting. The service is based on Gilat’s broadband VSATs — Gemini for enterprise and Scorpio for consumers — which support self-install and automatic service activation. The targeted customer base includes both private consumers and corporate customers in unserved and underserved locations, according to Gilat.

“Broadband over satellite has become a reality with High Throughput Satellites (HTS) now answering the market demand for affordable, plentiful and quality data connectivity. We see more and more Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and DTH providers using broadband over satellite as a mainstream vehicle to acquire new consumers as well as to reduce churn,” said Michal Aharonov, Gilat’s vice president of commercial.