OneWeb Signs Broadband Capacity Distribution Deal with Eutelsat

British-registered satellite company OneWeb, which is partly owned by the UK Government, has today announced a global, multi-year Distribution Partnership Agreement (DPA) with Eutelsat to help commercialise the company’s broadband services for key sectors including Maritime, Aviation, Enterprise, Telcos and Government.

The agreement shouldn’t come as much of a surprise because Eutelsat, which is a rival European satellite TV and broadband operator, already holds the second-largest stake in OneWeb. Eutelsat is of course best known for operating a rival geostationary satellite broadband network via their KONNECT platform, which sells to UK consumers via several ISPs including their own provider – Konnect Europe.

In theory, this means that Eutelsat could now leverage both their Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Geostationary Orbit (GEO) based satellites to offer a combined broadband product. We should point out that UK ISP BT has also signed a distribution deal to harness OneWeb’s new network (here), although we’re still waiting to see what kind of products will result from that.

Neil Masterson, OneWeb’s CEO, said:

“This expanded partnership with Eutelsat offers us a significant opportunity to combine our GEO and LEO connectivity solutions, expanding our global capacity and further enhancing our commercial service.

Drawing on Eutelsat’s decades of experience in serving the satellite industry, coupled with OneWeb’s substantial business momentum, the agreement demonstrates our collaborative approach to scaling up our LEO connectivity services. We are thrilled to see our services come together to expand connectivity solutions to communities.”

OneWeb itself has already launched a total of 428 small c.150kg LEO satellites into space – orbiting at an altitude of around 1,200km – and their initial plan is to build a constellation of 648 (588 are needed for coverage – the rest are for redundancy), which is enough for a reasonable level of global coverage. Such a network should be capable of delivering ultrafast broadband speeds (100Mbps+) and fast latency times of under 40ms.

However, the operator’s planned commercial launch has been impacted by the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has significantly delayed future launches and forced the company to adopt SpaceX’s rockets (here) – the same company that runs OneWeb’s arch rival, Starlink.