Eutelsat has confirmed that they’ve launched an additional 20 satellites, on the back of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, to join their global network of OneWeb broadband satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), which is a constellation that has been partly supported by the UK government. This is despite the network supposedly being completed last year.
OneWeb (aka – Eutelsat OneWeb) previously had 634 small (c.150kg) first generation (GEN1) Low Earth Orbit (LEO) platforms in space – orbiting at an altitude of 1,200km above the Earth (588 of them for coverage and the rest for redundancy). The network was technically completed in March 2023 (here), promising both ultrafast broadband speeds and fast latency times, but a further 15 satellites (plus one GEN2 prototype) were then added in May 2023 to add “resiliency and redundancy to the network” (here).
The May 2023 launch was heralded as the last one needed to “deliver global coverage“, so it came as a bit of a surprise when we noticed (X) – without any press releases being issued (either directly to us or via OneWeb’s website) – that the operator had suddenly lofted an additional 20 GEN1 satellites into low earth orbit on Saturday (19th Oct 2024). But to be fair they did mention it on their launch page, albeit without giving much context.
The move takes their total satellite count to 654, which is slightly more than the 648 that was originally proposed some years earlier. We assume this is needed to ensure proper and reliable global coverage and capacity, without needing to compromise on any gaps due to previously having delivered slightly less than originally planned.
Meanwhile, a tentative ambition still exists for OneWeb to deploy a total of 2,000 satellites (although they could go beyond that) and 1,280 of those will be the future GEN2 model that could sit in a higher Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) of 8,500km, which are widely expected to have more data capacity, support 5G mobile and may, possibly, introduce enhanced navigation and positioning features (something the UK government wants).
The upside of being placed into a higher orbit is that each satellite will be able to cover a much wider area of the Earth’s surface, although the downside is that performance (mainly latency) will suffer. But it is possible to balance this by using LEOs for latency intensive applications (e.g. multiplayer video games, voice calls) and MEOs to help with more data transfer intensive activities (e.g. file downloads and video streaming).
The catch is that the Eutelsat Group isn’t exactly flush with spare cash at the moment (there’s quite a big debt issue) and thus much may depend upon what approach the EU takes to growing their own IRIS 2 LEO constellation, which may or may not choose to link that with Eutelsat – assuming it even goes ahead in the first place.