No longer "unlimited" package

"PARIS 2011: Paris-based Eutelsat, which has been planning Ka-Sat since 2007, expects Ka-Sat will reach profitability by the three-year mark with around 300,000 subscribers, although depending on the mix of professional and consumer users, that milestone may come earlier or later. Counting just consumers, Ka-Sat can accommodate up to 1 million subscribers, according to Eutelsat estimates."

KA-SAT has 82 beams, 2 of which are half bandwidth.  Approx capacity 400 Mbit/s download per beam.  1,000,000 customers / 81 = 12,345 customers per beam.  Bit rate per customer = 400 Mbit/s / 12,345 = 32.4 kbit/s. If the fill factor is 50% then 16 kbit/s per customer = 4.8 Gbytes per customer per 28 days.

It will be interesting to see what FAP/FUP Eutelsat/Skylogic come up with.  Maybe the new fair access policy will put Mbytes sliding window limits per hour, 4 hours, 12 hours, week and 28 days as before.

Whatever they do they need to try to meet the conflicting needs of the re-seller sales people who would like to use expressions like "20 Mbit/s unlimited" and the prospective customers who need to be given a realistic expectation of what the service will be like.  e.g. "10GB allowance: Up to 20 Mbit/s, 28 day average up to 33 kbit/s"