A new competitor for Elon Musk’s Starlink: the merger between the satellite operators Eutelsat and OneWeb, which should give birth to a European giant in the race for Internet from space, was approved this Thursday, September 28 by the shareholders. The new company, called Eutelsat Group, will retain its headquarters in France and will continue to be listed on the Paris Stock Exchange.
This operation consolidates Eutelsat’s pivot towards telecoms, while the market for high-speed space connectivity in low orbit, particularly useful for serving isolated regions lacking optical fiber, is estimated at $16 billion over the horizon. 2030. Eutelsat Group, for its part, should generate a turnover of “around 2 billion euros in 2027”, according to a press release. The 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 global satellite internet providers. , with more than two million customers.
Starlink has already put nearly 3,600 satellites into orbit 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 its territory from of 2027.
Satellites in low orbit
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, and allow faster communications.
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 striking example: the request from the Ukrainian Minister of Digital to Elon Musk to provide an internet connection in areas hit by assaults by the Russian army since the invasion launched at the end of February 2022.