A new competitor for Starlink and Elon Musk: the merger between satellite operators Eutelsat and OneWeb, which should give birth to a European giant in the race for internet from space, was approved Thursday by shareholders.
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The new company, called Eutelsat Group, will retain its headquarters in France and will continue to be listed on the Paris Stock Exchange. It should generate a turnover of around 2 billion euros in 2027 », i.e. growth of more than 10% per year, according to a press release.
This operation consolidates Eutelsat’s pivot towards telecommunications, while the market for high-speed space connectivity in low orbit (OTB), particularly useful for serving isolated regions lacking optical fiber, is estimated at $16 billion at the 2030 horizon.
Especially since this growing sector has already seen the emergence of major players, such as the Amazon constellation or the Starlink juggernaut led by Elon Musk, which has taken a head start by establishing itself as one of the main suppliers global satellite internet companies, with more than two million customers.
Starlink has already orbited nearly 3,600 satellites and has been authorized to deploy 7,500 of the 30,000 second-generation satellites in its constellation. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, 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 the European Union formalized at the end of November 2022 the launch of its own constellation, Iris, intended to secure the internet and its communications throughout the territory of the EU from 2027.
Low Earth orbit
“ Faced with increased international competition, the creation of Eutelsat Group strengthens the European offer of satellite telecommunications services, a field in which France was a pioneer by manufacturing the first constellations », Underlined Thursday the French Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire, in a press release.
Historical satellite internet services pass through machines in geostationary orbit, at an altitude of more than 35,000 km. But their distance means that they cannot achieve the performance of a very high-speed connection, in particular due to the delay between the command and the execution of the request. Future satellites, like those already set up by Starlink, on the other hand, operate in low Earth orbit around the Earth, i.e. at an altitude of a few hundred kilometers.
Smaller and much less expensive, they allow low latency communications, that is to say with reduced transmission delay, and therefore faster. Having access to the internet on the open sea, in the air, in the desert or in conflict zones is now possible thanks to these new constellations.
The most notable example: the request from the Ukrainian Minister of Digital to Elon Musk to bring an internet connection to areas hit by assaults by the Russian army since the invasion launched at the end of February 2022. SpaceX had also donated 50 terminals Starlink satellites to the Tonga Islands to help them reconnect with the world, after the eruption of a volcano in mid-January 2022.
(with AFP)