OneWeb, a rival to Elon Musk’s Internet satellite enterprise Starlink, is aiming for global reach after successfully launching the last batch of satellites needed to deliver broadband services over the weekend.
The British startup launched an extra 36 satellites on Sunday morning from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India, bringing the prevailing constellation to 618 satellites. The satellites were launched at 9am local time on Sunday on an LVM3 rocket developed by Indian state-owned company NewSpace India Limited.
While OneWeb still has a few more satellites to deploy in May and June, according to company management, it now has enough to provide web connectivity anywhere on the earth. The corporate hopes to offer worldwide coverage to its customers by the tip of the 12 months.
“This implies we are going to have the option to deliver what has been missing for a very long time: high-speed, low-latency broadband connectivity on every ocean-going vessel – yachts, offshore industries, offshore oil rigs – every aircraft will now be connected to high-speed, low-latency connectivity.” OneWeb CEO Sunil Bharti Mittal said during a telephone call with reporters on Monday morning.
“Desert, forest, mountains, Himalayas – all hard-to-reach areas will begin to overlap.”
Excluding a few ground stations yet to be established, Mittal said a lot of the “critical” ground infrastructure for its network is already in play.
Founded in 2012, OneWeb wants to beam high-speed web to Earth from a network of low-Earth orbit satellites at an altitude of about 750 miles.
OneWeb plans to launch a total of 648 satellites, of which 588 are needed for global coverage. The remaining will function backups that may step in in case other satellites within the network go down.
OneWeb competes with a range of corporations including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Amazon and Inmarsat.
In July last 12 months, it entered into a merger agreement with Eutelsat, a French satellite company. Management expects the merger to be finalized by the summer.
Once the transaction is accomplished, OneWeb plans to go public on the London Stock Exchange.
The corporate faces stiff competition. Starlink, Musk’s SpaceX space web unit, has launched 1000’s of satellites to provide network connectivity in places with patchy web.
Mittal said OneWeb has “some catching up to do”, but added that the corporate sees “solid” demand from its goal markets including North America, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Australia, Latin America and Africa.
The loss-making company now generates tens of millions of dollars in revenue every month, according to Mittal. It expects to in the future attract a whole lot of tens of millions of dollars in revenue.
Unlike Starlink, which sells broadband packages to consumers, OneWeb says it’s aimed toward enterprise customers.
He has signed agreements with the biggest telecommunications corporations, including Australia’s Telstra and France’s Orange. By the tip of February, OneWeb had dozens of consumers in 15 countries.
OneWeb has been saved from bankruptcy thanks to a $1 billion financing package backed by the UK government and Indian telecommunications conglomerate Bharti Global.
Faced with quite a few setbacks, including the shortcoming to launch satellites from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, OneWeb continues to attract a whole lot of tens of millions of dollars in investment from previous SoftBank backers to fuel its costly space-based delivery ambitions.
“The promise I made to the British government has been fulfilled,” Mittal said on Monday.
The federal government owns 20% of OneWeb and is the second largest shareholder.
After the cope with Eutelsat, the federal government will retain some control through a “special shareholding” that offers it a say in the situation of future OneWeb launches and the national security safeguards the corporate holds.