SES cleared by the United Kingdom to buy Intelsat
The long-established Luxembour satellite company SES has now gotten regulatory approval from the United Kingdom to buy another long-established satellite company, Intelsat, with the purchase price €2.8 billion.
SES’s €2.8 billion acquisition of Intelsat was cleared by the UK’s competition regulator, in a move that will create a satellite giant to better compete with Elon Musk’s Starlink. The Competition and Markets Authority decided on the basis of “the information currently available to it,” to not subject the deal to an in-depth probe, it said in a statement on Friday.
The deal still needs to be approved by the European Union, which has set June 10th as the deadline for a decision.
This merger is because these older satellite companies are presently losing in competition with the many new low-orbit satellite constellations by new companies, led mostly by Starlink. By merging they hope to compete better.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The long-established Luxembour satellite company SES has now gotten regulatory approval from the United Kingdom to buy another long-established satellite company, Intelsat, with the purchase price €2.8 billion.
SES’s €2.8 billion acquisition of Intelsat was cleared by the UK’s competition regulator, in a move that will create a satellite giant to better compete with Elon Musk’s Starlink. The Competition and Markets Authority decided on the basis of “the information currently available to it,” to not subject the deal to an in-depth probe, it said in a statement on Friday.
The deal still needs to be approved by the European Union, which has set June 10th as the deadline for a decision.
This merger is because these older satellite companies are presently losing in competition with the many new low-orbit satellite constellations by new companies, led mostly by Starlink. By merging they hope to compete better.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Competing with Starlink will, I think, turn out to be a forlorn hope. GEO-based provision of Internet services has always been pretty niche-y and low-performance. Calling it “broadband” represents considerable gilding of the lily. What is really killing GEO comsats is not Starlink, per se, but the rise of streaming services that mostly use terrestrial broadband for distribution and also Starlink a bit around the edges – mainly in mobile applications, eg., planes, trains and ships. The old GEO model of carrying multiple cable or cable-like channels that have fixed schedules for their offerings is now viewed as less preferable than on-demand streaming by nearly everyone. These outfits need to find a new “killer app” for GEO comsats and I am not at all sure there is one to be found.
In the meantime, the GEO comsat outfits will diminish in both number and value through such acquisitions as the one reported on here. The paltry transaction price of 2.9 billion euros is the best possible illustration of the likely dead-end nature of most of the GEO comsat business.