Government to Splash £500m on OneWeb Broadband Satellites

The UK Government will reportedly invest around £500m (equity) into British-registered space company OneWeb as part of a wider private-sector consortium bid. The firm has been busy building a global network of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites for ultrafast broadband, but as part of the deal it may have to deliver GPS too.

Until late March 2020 OneWeb (here) was still in the process of building a large constellation of 648 compact Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites in order to achieve full global coverage by the end of 2021 (74 have already launched) and in theory this constellation could grow to 48,000 (here), although that would be subject to demand and is currently a bit pie in the sky.

The low altitude of such spacecraft enables them to deliver significantly lower latency, while “fibre-like” broadband ISP speeds were anticipated for end-users in even some of the remotest parts of the world (an early test from last year hit speeds of 400Mbps and an average latency of 32ms). But in order to do that you need hundreds and, ideally, thousands of LEOs in order to maintain coverage.

By comparison the huge double-decker bus sized geostationary orbit (GEO / GSO) satellite(s) of old sit many times higher above the earth (distance of about 35,000km+ vs around 500-1300km for LEOs) and have significant coverage, but their snail like latency times and limited capacity are a disadvantage for broadband performance. Likewise each one takes years and hundreds of millions to build, which makes them slow to adapt to demand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIrIt0R47Z8

In other words, large networks of relatively inexpensive LEOs – these are designed with a short lifespan and after that they will de-orbit to help control “space junk” – could deliver superior performance and have less trouble adapting to rising demand. On the other hand they’re technically challenging to develop and the initial costs of launching an operational global network are still significant.

OneWeb’s Financial Woes

Unfortunately satellite operator OneWeb, which has already had c.$3bn of investment from SoftBank, is the kind of high risk space company that has to spend vast amounts of money before being able to make any income (most are like that but LEO constellations on this scale are an entirely new field).

Suffice to say that money worries are a fact of life for OneWeb and their on-going problems recently combined with the arrival of COVID-19 to create a perfect storm, which forced them to file for voluntary relief under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code in the USA. Since then they’ve been desperately hunting for a buyer, with rival Amazon known to have shown an interest (among other groups from France and China etc.).

Despite this a report in the FT (paywall) claims that the UK Government has decided to invest £500m to help rescue OneWeb as part of a wider private-sector consortium bid, which would potentially see them holding a stake of up to 20% in the company. But there are a couple of rather significant catches.

Firstly, the UK wants OneWeb to move its manufacturing base out of the USA and on to our shores. Secondly, the Government wants OneWeb to adapt its LEOs in order to support an innovative new global positioning technology from Satellite Applications Catapult, which it believes would be cheaper than investing £4bn to £5bn in order to develop its own system (seen as necessary now that Brexit has lost the UK access to the EU’s Galileo system).

The USA appears to be opposed to the idea of the UK developing its own system to rival GPS, but one using LEOs would be different as they would in theory act more as a complement and enhancement to GPS. The report claims that US Defence officials thus favour the OneWeb approach.

Risk vs Reward

In theory the Government’s approach makes sense, but on the slip side OneWeb is still an unproven business and they’re up against much better established giants, such as SpaceX. Similarly the idea of using LEOs to do GPS certainly has merit, although it’s unclear whether this will compromise their original purpose for broadband.

Lest we forget that the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has put £5bn on the table to help spread “gigabit-capable” broadband to every home by the end of 2025, which will focus on the final 20% of premises. Admittedly OneWeb’s network doesn’t seem likely to deliver 1Gbps to each home, but as a measure of last resort it could still have a role to play (government frameworks often set a lower minimum speed threshold), such as in a small proportion of extremely remote locations where neither fixed line nor mobile can feasibly connect.

The Government also risks becoming the target of rising anger from astronomers, particularly if the LEOs turn out to be as disruptive to astronomical observation science as feared. SpaceX’s rival Starlink network has already given us a few hints about that, which is despite the fact that none of these new LEO constellations are currently anywhere close to their future size.

Lest we forget that OneWeb got to this point by burning through a large pile of money and it’ll surely burn through much more before achieving enough coverage to make it viable. Suffice to say that there’s a sizeable level of risk in this sort of venture and the rewards remain unproven.

At the same time the need to move manufacturing from the USA to UK is all well and good, but it will add additional costs and delay at a time when OneWeb really need to get back into the business of launching new satellites or risk losing vital momentum against SpaceX.