By Wendell Roelf CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - Leading European satellite operator Eutelsat is negotiating with a range of distributors to underpin an African broadband strategy targeting an untapped market of millions seeking Internet connectivity. Last month the French firm announced a partnership with Facebook that would use satellite technology to get more Africans online across large parts of the continent, with the first of two satellites coming online at the end of next year. Eutelsat is also investing in a second standalone satellite that will be launched in 2019. "For the 2016 satellite, obviously we want and we need to have a distribution network in place when the service becomes available at the end of next year," Eutelsat's chief commercial and development officer, Michel Azibert, said on Wednesday. He said Eutelsat was looking at three types of prospective distributors -- leading mobile operators, private television stations, such as Naspers unit Multichoice, as well as data capacity integrators, for example Liquid Telecom in Uganda. "It will be better to get these agreements in place within 6 months to give time for logistics, procurement of equipment and antennaes to be installed and marketing," Azibert told Reuters on the sidelines of an African telecoms conference in Cape Town. The first satellite will help ramp up market demand before the second, bigger satellite is launched in 2019 as Eutelsat targets "hundreds of thousands" of reception points across West, East and Southern Africa. As smartphones become cheaper and Africa embraces the rollout of 3G and 4G services, a new study from Ericsson projects that mobile data traffic will grow 15-fold between 2015 and 2021.Azibert said the first satellite will target larger population areas in 7 countries, including Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya, with the second satellite expected to cover the entire Sub-Saharan region and beam to remote village audiences, small and medium companies as well as premium individual consumers. "The advantage of satellite in terms of reach of coverage is huge," Azibert said of a technology complementing traditional fibre-optic land-based cables concentrated in large African cities. (Editing by Keith Weir)