Update – OneWeb and SpaceX LEO Ultrafast Broadband Satellites

Good progress is being made by rivals SpaceX and OneWeb, which are both now rapidly moving into a new phase of large-scale deployments on the road to creating two mega constellations of compact Low Earth Orbit (LEO) ultrafast broadband satellites; these should eventually offer “fibre like” speeds to consumers across the world.

At present most broadband internet connectivity services – those delivered to consumers in the UK via satellites at least – come from spacecraft that are positioned high above the Earth in geostationary orbits (GEO / GSO), which often reflects a distance of about 35,000km+ from the planet’s surface.

Such satellites are the size of a double decker bus, have limited peak capacity and take years, as well as hundreds of millions of pounds, to build. As a result latency times are often incredibly slow (around 600 – 1000 milliseconds – useless for fast paced online video games etc.), data allowances are often meagre and service speeds can suffer (especially at peak times).

By comparison both SpaceX (Starlink) and OneWeb (Microsat) hope to eclipse the old solutions by creating vast constellations of significantly smaller LEO satellites. Such platforms tend to weigh around 150-260Kg each and, with solar sails folded, are often smaller than an adult human. The LEOs tend to orbit at around 500-1300km above the Earth, which is significantly nearer than their giant cousins and thus fast latency times of 25-40ms are viable.

Both companies spent the best part of 2019 testing a sizeable number of trial satellites, although over the past couple of months they’ve begun to switch into a mass deployment phase. At the time of writing SpaceX has now launched a total of 240 Starlink satellites (aiming for 4,425 by 2024 and 10,000+ by a later date) and OneWeb have only done 6 but they’ll launch 34 more on 6th February 2020 (aiming for 650 by 2021 and potentially 1,980 by a later date).

SpaceX hopes to have 800 satellites in orbit by around mid-2020, which is enough for their partial global coverage to go commercial by the end of this year or early 2021. Meanwhile OneWeb has said that they aim to begin their first customer demos at the end of 2020 and will then proceed to full commercial global services in 2021.

At this stage we have no idea what sort of packages and prices will be offered to consumers (speeds of up to 1Gbps have been talked about), although we know that OneWeb will initially target the “maritime, aviation, government and enterprise” sectors (remote homes may have to wait a bit longer). One of OneWeb’s early tests also achieved speeds of 400Mbps and average latency of 32ms (here).

We should point out that all of these LEO satellites are designed with a short lifespan and after that they will de-orbit (either automatically or if that fails then gravity will pull them down within 1-5 years). The reason for this is to help tackle fears of too much “space junk” around the Earth (potentially blocking access to space if a chain reaction of collisions were to occur).

Both companies will also have to contend with a growing number of angry astronomers, who fear that the tiny spacecraft will make it increasingly hard to do science through observations. SpaceX has experimented with painting one of their Starlink’s black but most of those being launched remain highly reflective.

We’ve posted this update as an alternative to writing (spamming) about the repetitive launch announcements (e.g. SpaceX), which will become much more frequent during 2020. Sadly these don’t tell us anything terribly new, except that the networks are growing in size. Hopefully the next time we write something up we’ll be able to tell you about some proper tests or live products.