Despite its collapse into bankruptcy on March 27, OneWeb has stepped up its ambitions in 5G and broadband.
In late May, it submitted a request to the US communications regulator for plans to launch up to 48,000 satellites. Boss Adrian Steckel, the Texan telecoms veteran who remains chief executive amid its bankruptcy, said: “We have always believed LEO satellites must be part of a converged broadband network.”
In the US, this has seen the Federal Communications Commission promising nearly $10bn in incentive payments to satellite makers as part of its 5G rural broadband auction, which, according to Morgan Stanley, could provide a $100bn opportunity by 2040.
Low-earth-orbit satellites are seen as being able to provide these “fibre-like” speeds because they are a lot lower than regular satellites, which are 35,000km above earth.
But despite being lower, the technology is not as simple as 5G beaming straight to a phone or broadband directly to a home router. Modern satellite phones are bulky and expensive and designed for remote environments like oil rigs or the Arctic.
“We have been talking about using this technology in hard to reach places for 15 years,” says Matthew Howett. “It’s the final 1 to 2pc.”
Satellite use for consumers would still rely on terminals on the ground. A rural home, for instance, could be connected to the satellites using a consumer antenna, rather than a fibre cable dug through miles of road. A satellite network would only prove efficient in these rural locations, rather than say in a town or city with its own cable and mobile network.
Although costs of satellites have come down, launching rockets is still not a cheap enterprise. Meanwhile, latency, the speed at which broadband signals travel back and forth, is an unsolved problem. Howett says: “The biggest barriers are cost and latency.”
OneWeb says its technology will soon be fit for 5G speeds. In tests in South Korea last year, broadband speeds using its low orbit satellites achieved 400Mbps and a latency of 32 milliseconds. Not quite as fast as ground networks, but the margin has shrunk. For regular rural broadband, however, it would plug a gap.
