Eutelsat Trains Ex-British Army to Install Satellite Broadband in UK Homes

European Satellite operator Eutelsat, which supplies the United Kingdom’s “Tooway” (KA-SAT) based ISPs, has confirmed that they’re helping to retrain almost 50 former British Armed Forces personnel in the fine art of installing Satellite broadband infrastructure for homes and businesses.

The forces resettlement programme, which is funded by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), aims to help ex-servicemen and women to find a new job through retraining in various different fields. In this case the participants have had to go through a two-week long Confederation of Aerial Industries approved training course at the Resettlement Training Centre in Aldershot.

Apparently any servicemen or women who have spent more than six years with the Armed Forces will qualify for the resettlement training programme at the centre. Once complete they will be certified to install Eutelsat’s Tooway broadband service around the country, which can be especially useful in remote rural areas.

Simon Gray, Eutelsat’s Senior Systems Integration Engineer, said:

“We could think of no-one better than former British military personnel to join our team of certified Tooway installers bringing quality broadband to consumers in unserved regions of the UK and wider Europe.”

Separately Eutelsat has so far certified over 4,000 installers (plus another 1,000 in the pipeline for training by the end of 2014) across 20 EU countries and in 8 languages as part of their free training programmes. However it’s unclear how many of those actually went on to get jobs doing what they had learnt.