OneWeb company close to taking the internet global – BBC News

London-based satellite operator OneWeb is in the house just after installing 40 more spacecraft this week.

It takes the company’s orbiting broadband constellation to over 580.

With another launch in the coming weeks, OneWeb will have enough overhead satellites to provide an Internet connection anywhere on Earth.

The firm moved quickly to recover its position after the financial collapse at the onset of Covid in March 2020.

When the UK government and Indian conglomerate Bharti bought it out of bankruptcy a few months later, it was flying fewer than 80 spacecraft.

Expansion since then has been nothing short of remarkable, CEO Neil Masterson said, with customers now served in 15 countries north of 50 degrees latitude, which includes the UK.

“We issued our first invoice last May, which is obviously a very big time for us. And at the end of December, we have $800 million of back bookings. So we are moving forward and we are excited to be expanding into the rest of the world really showing what this network system can do,” he told BBC News.

It takes some time for the recently launched satellites to properly position themselves 1,200 km above the Earth, to be tested and come online.

The lots that increased last year will extend coverage to the lower 48 US states and northern Mediterranean at the end of May, and 25 degrees north (think Mexico, North Africa and India) by the end of the summer.

The final launches will provide broadband connectivity to users at the equator later this year. And this pattern for the Northern Hemisphere repeats for major land areas in the Southern Hemisphere, including Antarctica, once the necessary ground stations are installed to complete the data links.

OneWeb expects to have approximately 40 nodes operational by the end of 2023.

The firm operates out of a refurbished BBC building on the site of the old 1908 Summer Olympics stadium.

Most people who pass by will almost certainly not be aware of the extraordinary operation that is taking place inside the silver-colored premises.

Only one other organization in the world – Elon Musk’s broadband Internet competitor, Starlink – flies more active spacecraft into orbit today.

The satellite fleet, which is spread across 12 separate aircraft in the sky, needs to be managed 24/7. It’s a huge software feat.

“You simply can’t control every single satellite at every step. So we rely heavily on automation,” explained Francesco Sacconi, director of satellite operations. “Satellites generally perform well, but if there’s a problem, we’ll be notified by the system.”

Similarly, broadband connections streaming through satellites are also constantly monitored.

“We can inject synthetic (data) packets into the network. We can see things like packet loss, latency, jitter, packets arriving out of sequence – anything that could degrade service performance,” said Matt Hall, who directs OneWeb’s network operations.

Unlike Elon Musk’s Starlink service, OneWeb does not sell broadband connections directly to the individual user. Its customers, mainly, are the telecommunications companies that provide this Internet service. They could also use the connectivity to integrate or expand infrastructure into their mobile phone networks.

A typical service plan for the user’s terminal, or antenna system, might be something like 75 megabits per second (MBPS) download and 15 MBPS upload. But a key aspect that both OneWeb and Starlink are highlighting is low latency, or the reduced time it takes for data to make a round trip on the network.

For traditional geostationary communications (GEO) satellites that are 36,000 km above the Earth, this ‘ping’ time could be 700 milliseconds. For new low-orbiting (LEO) satellites, it could be a tenth of that, say 80 milliseconds.

“This lets you do things like Teams (Microsoft) calls in real time. No lag, no lag, video runs smoothly, voices run smoothly,” said David Fuller, senior sales engineer.

“You can use Office applications where you have a team working on a document at the same time. You can’t do it with GEO; you can do it in LEO with OneWeb.”

The company will go to industry later this year to request their proposals to build the next generation of satellites. They will be bigger (perhaps half a ton each against today’s 150kg) and more powerful. But large numbers are unlikely to be procured.

Previously, there had been suggestions that OneWeb may have been trying to launch thousands of satellites. The current thinking now is that the operating constellation in the sky could max out at less than 1,000.

The other big goal for 2023 is to complete a merger with Eutelsat, the Paris-based satellite operator known for distributing thousands of TV channels worldwide.

The French connection has led to speculation that the new entity may be seeking a role in the EU’s planned multibillion-dollar connectivity constellation called Iris-Squared. As a heavily British group, and given Brexit, this might seem unlikely for OneWeb. But as an Anglo-French concern, it might become a different consideration.

CEO Neil Masterson won’t be drawn to any conversations, but he says the topic is open, not least because of the expertise OneWeb now brings to the table.

“It’s not easy to build these constellations,” he told BBC News.

“There are only two LEO constellations (OneWeb and Starlink). There’s a lot of PowerPoint out there about the others, but there are only two in operation. And there’s a reason for that: it’s actually pretty hard to do .”