BT Sign OneWeb Deal to Tackle UK Rural Broadband Slow Spots

UK ISP BT and satellite operator OneWeb, which is partly owned by the UK government, have reached an agreement that will see the two working together to bring ultrafast low-latency broadband speeds to some of the hardest to reach rural parts of the country, where even their £5bn Project Gigabit programme would struggle to go.

At present OneWeb has launched a total of 218 small Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites into space, with another 36 set to join those on 1st July 2021, and the initial plan is to build a constellation of 648 satellites, which is enough for a reasonable level of global coverage by around the end of 2022.

After that they have future approval for a total of 2,000 satellites and 1,280 of those will be a second-generation model that could sit in a higher Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) of 8,500km, but the latter would require much more investment. The first initial commercial (beta) broadband services are due to go live across parts of the UK, Alaska, Canada, Northern Europe, Greenland, Iceland, and the Arctic seas in November 2021.

The new network could potentially deliver ultrafast broadband speeds (100Mbps+) and latency times of under 40ms (example), although we still don’t know what sort of service will actually be made available to the domestic connectivity market and how much it might cost. Nevertheless, if recent tests by the rival Starlink (SpaceX) platform are anything to go by, OneWeb could offer a fix for poor broadband speeds in rural areas.

Back in February 2021 we reported that OneWeb were in early stage talks with telecoms giant BT (here) about the possibility of the two working together in order to tackle some of the hardest to reach parts of the country. The good news today, as confirmed by the Telegraph (paywall), is that an agreement has now been reached.

Philip Jansen, BT Group CEO, said:

“It is clear that greater partnership is needed, both with Government and within industry, to ensure connectivity can reach every last corner of the country. Our agreement with OneWeb is an important step to understanding how that goal could be achieved in the future.”

The deal could provide a solution for ongoing concerns around the 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO), which was originally touted as a fix to help connect some of the remotest areas. However, there are tens of thousands of premises in the final 1% of the UK where even the USO becomes far too expensive (here), with some install quotes even reaching beyond £1m+ for FTTP (i.e. in areas where even 4G can’t reach).

Similarly, even the Government’s new £5bn Project Gigabit programme has warned that it considers the final 0.3% of premises “could be prohibitively expensive to reach” (i.e. the same sort of area as their 10Mbps USO was supposed to fix). A separate consultation is currently considering how to tackle those, which is looking at everything from Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) networks to LEO satellites.

In our view, there are three potential approaches that BT and OneWeb could take with their new deal.

Possible BT OneWeb Broadband Solutions

— Satellite capacity for a 5G mobile or fixed wireless network.

— Satellite capacity to support a local fibre or hybrid fibre network.

— Direct to customer broadband solution (dish on house etc.).

At the time of writing, we haven’t seen any sign of a direct to consumer (Starlink style) broadband solution, although OneWeb has also talked about such a possibility. Nevertheless, most of the time the satellite operator has preferred to talk about domestic connectivity as serving “communities” (i.e. usually a reference to using satellite capacity for a community distribution model, such as to feed a local fixed line or wireless network).

Lest we forget that BT has also helped to develop satellite technologies for use alongside 5G networks (here), which might plausibly be used to kill two birds with one stone (mobile and broadband connectivity) in remote rural areas. Obviously, the Government, which has already invested £400m ($500m) into OneWeb, will be keen to see the two working together in order to help validate their investment. Time will tell.

UPDATE 28th June 2021

A tiny bit more detail on this. The BT and OneWeb deal is based on a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), which will see the pair work together in order to find ways of solving rural broadband notspots and slowspots. The ideas proposed by this MoU are much the same as the ones we suggested above, but it’s all still very much in the R&D phase.

In our experience it tends to take quite a long time to turn such things into a viable commercial product, so it may be awhile before we see a domestic connectivity solution.