On March 28, OneWeb, a provider of global satellite Internet, . Its position has weakened due to the coronavirus pandemic, the subsequent economic crisis and strong competition from Amazon and SpaceX. In addition, the company received a refusal to provide the frequencies necessary for work in Russia - the country's special services opposed it.
At the beginning of the year, the provider was supposed to receive an additional $ 2 billion from its investor, SoftBank, but the epidemic disrupted plans. Negotiations collapsed on March 21, hours before the successful launch of 34 OneWeb satellites into orbit. The company had to resort to bankruptcy proceedings to protect itself from creditors. The media began to publish articles about the problems of satellite Internet in the future, but it seems that everything is not so bad. A few days ago UK . And these are not just statements - a corresponding agreement has been signed.
The document was signed by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Finance Minister Rishi Sunak. Finally . For the UK, this is a great opportunity to get their own navigation system. After leaving the European Union, the country lost the ability to use Galileo satellites, so now the government is looking for alternatives. Initially, it was planned to create their own system from scratch, but this project turned out to be unmanageable even for such a developed country as the UK. OneWeb has previously stated that it will provide not only communication services, but a GPS service for civil and military purposes.
Despite the start of bankruptcy proceedings, the company did not seem to be going to stop its activities at all. So, on May 28, she filed an application with the US Federal Communications Commission to expand its constellation of satellites from 720 devices to 48. According to the representatives of the company, such a step will provide an opportunity to provide high-quality communications to absolutely all users of satellite Internet.
βOneWeb is building a truly global communications network to bring high-speed, low-latency broadband to the world. Our current situation is a consequence of the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis.β .
For OneWeb, cooperation and partnership with the British government is an opportunity to avoid bankruptcy. The company's assets are of great interest to many companies - for example, applications for their acquisition were previously submitted by Cerberus Capital Management, Amazon, Eutelsat and SpaceX.
As for the work of OneWeb, the company is not going to supply communication services directly to consumers, but to cooperate with the largest telecommunications companies in the world. According to the plan, it is the partners of the satellite Internet provider who should provide their customers with access to communications from OneWeb. Satellite Internet would be very useful for remote and hard-to-reach regions and ships. According to company representatives, the user can be in a car, helicopter, on top of a mountain, anywhere in the world - the connection will always be available.
Initially, OneWeb's plans were rather modest: the constellation of satellites was supposed to consist of 588 devices and several backup devices. Production of one apparatus . Some of the satellites have already been launched and entered the calculated orbit.
In addition to OneWeb, their own constellations of communications satellites are formed in orbit by Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos's Project Kuiper, the head of Amazon, and the Canadian company Telesat. The devices will be placed in low orbits in order to ensure the minimum signal delay and high data transfer rate.
Source: habr.com