Elon Musk’s Starlink has to brace for a new competitor, following the approval by shareholders on Thursday of a merger between satellite operators Eutelsat and OneWeb.
The merger will create a European giant in the race for Internet from space.
The new company, Eutelsat Group, will retain its headquarters in France and continue to be listed on the Paris stock exchange.
The deal consolidates Eutelsat’s pivot towards telecoms, at a time when the market for high-speed space connectivity in low-Earth orbit, particularly useful for serving isolated regions lacking fibre optics, is estimated to be worth $16 billion by 2030.
Eutelsat Group, for its part, is expected to generate revenues of “around €2 billion in 2027,” according to a statement.
The sector has already seen the emergence of major players, such as Amazon’s constellation or the Elon Musk-led behemoth Starlink, which has taken a lead by establishing itself as one of the world’s leading satellite Internet providers, with more than two million customers.
Starlink has already put nearly 3,600 satellites into orbit and has been authorised to deploy 7,500 of the 30,000 satellites in the second generation of its constellation. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for his part, plans to deploy more than 3,200 satellites for his Kuiper constellation.
Behind these American projects, China is banking on its Guowang constellation of 13,000 satellites, while, in late November 2022, the European Union officially launched its own constellation, Iris, designed to secure the Internet and its communications throughout its territory from 2027.
The historical services of satellite Internet go through spacecraft in geostationary orbit, at an altitude of more than 35,000 km. However, their remoteness means they cannot achieve the performance of a very high-speed connection, mainly because of the delay between the command and the execution of the request.
Future satellites, like those already put in place by Starlink, on the other hand, operate in low orbit around the Earth, i.e. at an altitude of a few hundred kilometres, and enable faster communications.
Having access to the Internet on the open sea, in the air, in the desert or in conflict zones is now a possibility thanks to these new constellations.
