UK Government Seeks to do More with OneWeb’s Broadband Satellites
The Government’s Minister for Digital Government and Data, Ian Murray MP, has indicated that they’re looking closely at how their stake in OneWeb’s (Eutelsat) constellation of ultrafast broadband satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) could be used to ensure domestic communications resilience in remote areas; as opposed to becoming too reliant on Elon Musk’s Starlink.
OneWeb, which regular readers may recall was originally rescued from bankruptcy by the UK government and Bharti Global, before later becoming a part of Eutelsat – with concessions (here), currently has 654 small (c.150kg) first generation (GEN1) LEO platforms in space – orbiting at an altitude of 1,200km (c.600 of them for coverage and the rest for redundancy). Plans also exist to renew and enhance the constellation with a further 440 satellites being planned for launch – starting later in 2026 (here).
However, in terms of UK deployments and connectivity resilience, OneWeb has often tended to play second fiddle to Starlink’s (SpaceX) significantly larger, more affordable, more accessible (e.g. Starlink does direct to consumer broadband and mobile connectivity) and more capable LEO broadband network.
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The flip side of this is that some MPs have been expressing concerns about political instability across the pond and how much we may now be relying on Starlink, which is something that came up for debate in parliament today.
Dame Chi Onwurah (Labour MP) said:
“Starlink is a US telecoms company owned by a South African American who advocates civil war in the United Kingdom. OneWeb is a European satellite telecoms company, which is part-owned by the UK. Yesterday the Science Minister told my Committee that OneWeb could be used to ensure domestic communications resilience in remote areas.
Can the Minister tell me whether our critical rural broadband infrastructure is more dependent on Starlink or on OneWeb?”
In response, Ian Murray MP confirmed that the government remains a shareholder in Eutelsat, of which OneWeb is a part (in July 2025 we had a 10.89% stake), and said the government would be “examining all these issues … We have asked for Eutelsat to come forward with proposals to ensure that we have that resilience here in the UK, and we want to make more use of that shareholding.”
At this stage it’s unclear precisely what the government expects to get from Eutelsat that it couldn’t already harness today, if so desired. The big challenge also remains the fact that Starlink is often a better and more capable product, particularly for connecting individual rural homes and businesses.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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This, like most commentary ends up going nowhere. Consultants make a fortune and no one actually benefits, particularly the British taxpayer – who, let’s face it, paid for the majority of this fiasco in the first place.
Many years ago, our company wavemobile contacted Oneweb to discuss backhaul and potential D2C opportunities. For a log time, after an initially exciting call nothing happened. Then it was sold/gifted to Eutelsat and today we still have no benefits.
I find it pretty disgusting that we are buying backhaul for our network that provides ultra rural coverage to UK residents at pur expense, from Starlink. Why is that? Surely if a team of five people can roll out a mobile network that actually works (two million devices per yea) then a well funded government backed scheme should be able to provide it’s own sovereign nation with a service to backhaul it.
The reality is that no one cares The money is spent/lost so we can move onto the next thing. Britain ha some amazing engineering skills, properly world class. When did we allow this rot to become acceptable?
I quite agree, I hate paying a South African Nazi drug addict for my broadband, but since the indolent, greedy BT/OpenRetch can’t be arsed to hand fibre cables on existing poles, what can I do?