Finance For O3b Heavenly Body Project

The financing has been feel safe for a of the many desirous blurb space projects of the decade.

O3b Networks has lifted $1.2bn (700m) for a array of satellites to encouragement super-fast broadband connectors to Africa and other rising markets.

The booster will deed as backhaul, joining the traffic of local telecoms and internet service providers to the universal twine infrastructure.

O3b has its domicile in Jersey, Channel Islands.

The firm sensitive the markets early on Monday that a gathering of investors and banks would supply the allowance it indispensable to launch the venture's initial 8 satellites.

These will be assembled by Thales Alenia Space at its production trickery in Cannes, with the initial platforms ready to go in to circuit in the initial half of 2013.

Russian Soyuz rockets will launch the satellites from the new Sinamary spaceport in French Guiana.

O3b's largest debt facility, a few $510m, is being supposing by HSBC, ING, CA-CIB and Dexia. This is underwritten by the French trade credit agency, Coface, that has been exceedingly active not long ago in ancillary large space projects involving Thales Alenia.

O3b stands for "other 3 billion", a moniker is to number of people in the world mentioned to have unsound broadband internet access.

One of the reasons for this dearth is the AWOL in many regions of a fortitude of super-fast fibre-optic-cable connections. O3b's prophesy is to supply a "fibre in the sky" substitute with a constellation of high-throughput satellites.

This constellation will be put in a Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) about 8,000km on top of the equator, providing coverage around the creation to a embodiment of in addition to and reduction 45 Degrees.

Each 700kg heavenly body will run in the high-frequency Ka-band of the air wave spectrum.

They will competition 12 steerable antennas to couple customers to O3b's 8 belligerent stations from where traffic may be fed in to the twine network that underpins the internet in the created world. O3b's goal is to put 20 satellites in circuit eventually.

Announcing the new equity, Mark Rigolle, the arch senior manager of O3b Networks, said: "This has authorised us to secure our appropriation and to accomplish our goal of reaching the billions who have so far been feeble served or entirely cut off from the internet - the paramount business and data resource of our time."

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk