OneWeb LEO Satellite Test Delivers 195Mbps Broadband Speed

British registered OneWeb, which is part-owned by the UK government, and Eutelsat have demonstrated how fast the company’s new global constellation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) based broadband satellites can operate when connected to one of Kymeta’s Hawk u8 user terminals, mounted on a 4×4 Land Rover Discovery.

The company’s Proof of Concept (PoC) test, which formed part of a presentation intended for the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA), connected to its LEO constellation and successfully streamed 4K video feeds, while also running Teams (Microsoft), Twitch and GoogleEarth applications. Download speeds of 195Mbps were recorded, with uploads of 32Mbps and latency times of down to 70ms (milliseconds).

The hands-on live demonstration enabled the NATO attendees to get a feel for the steps that, together, OneWeb and Eutelsat are making to “provide a multi-orbit architecture that will deliver robust and resilient connectivity to deliver data and communications.” The results were not that different from what end-users can expect from Starlink (SpaceX), although OneWeb doesn’t sell to individual consumers and their network isn’t yet being placed under much load.

The company has so far launched 634 of their small c.150kg LEO based broadband satellites into space (plus 1 experimental GEN2 spacecraft) – orbiting at an altitude of 1,200km above the Earth (588 of them for coverage and the rest are for redundancy) – and in March 2023 they announced that this marked the completion of their global network (here). Some work and ground stations still needs to be completed, but the network is expected to be fully ready by the end of 2023.

NATO is currently in the process of moving away from “large, long-term and static communications infrastructure towards more agile, mobile and platform-based connectivity solutions for faster operational tempo,” said OneWeb’s Director of Government, Charlie Clark.