Starlink review, four months in

Re:Starlink review, four months in by ncallaway on Thursday July 22, 2021 @03:32PM (#27923164)

Is OneWeb still in the game? I saw that they had been financial issues and were sold to the UK and I kind of assumed that they had ended their constellation goals.

It’d be great if they were still working on it, though

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Re:Starlink review, four months in by skissane on Thursday July 22, 2021 @07:36PM (#27925613)

They are still in the game, but not quite the same game.

They have done 8 launches so far, including 4 this year, with another 5 scheduled this year and then more next year. At the moment they have 248 operational satellites in their constellation. Their goal is 648 satellites, which is gong to take them (approximately) 11 more launches.

But 648, is quite small in scale compared to Starlink's plan for an initial constellation of 12,000, with an additional 30,000 currently going through the approval process. Starlink already has more working satellites in orbit than OneWeb's planned full constellation size.

Given that, it is difficult for OneWeb to compete with Starlink head-on, so they are basically ceding to Starlink the B2C space and going after B2B instead. I think with UK government and UK military they are going to have some success, since the UK will likely prefer OneWeb given that it is a UK-headquartered company with partial UK government ownership.

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Re:Starlink review, four months in by ncallaway on Thursday July 22, 2021 @08:29PM (#27925990)

Well, that’s great! I’m glad they’re still competing in the space and have a good foot-hold.

I think competition in this space is important in the long run.

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