One comment

• Dick Eagleson

  June 20, 2025 at 12:43 pm

  The finances of OneWeb have gone through so many convolutions over the years that I’ve quite lost track of who all owns the thing and what the divvy-up is. If France is on-track to own 30% then I guess all of the ownership question marks are now concentrated in the remaining 70%.

  It’s interesting that at least a majority of that now 70% bunch of shareholders – formerly 85% – was willing to yield a 15% stake for a billion and a half bucks. That values the entire enterprise at about $10 billion, a tiny fraction of what SpaceX is worth and less, even, than what Rocket Lab is worth by nearly $3 billion.

  This mingy valuation is almost certainly due to four factors:

  1. The OneWeb constellation is static. There are not 2 – 4 loads of additional sats being added to the fleet every week as is true of Starlink. That means, among other things, that any new subscribers are in a zero-sum game with extant subscribers for bandwidth in any given territory.

  2. There are no high-bandwidth laser cross-links on any of the OneWeb sats. So far as I know, there are no lower-bandwidth RF cross-links either. This means ground stations are essential for the operation of the network and eliminates OneWeb as competition in most kinds of mobile markets, especially over-water aviation and blue water maritime.

  3. Reliance on up-and-down links means that the further apart any two land sites are that want to communicate, the more of these hops there will be, increasing effective network latency vs Starlink. That would also be true for intercontinental traffic or traffic between larger land masses and islands or among islands themselves which, presumably must often rely on terrestrial cables for at least part of each such connection except, perhaps, in relatively compact/dense archipelagos – places like some of the Pacific Island groups and Indonesia. Such reliance could also limit up-and-down hops on longer all-land routes too, but, past a certain point, it is questionable just how much one can call the result “satellite broadband.”

  4. All of the disadvantages baked into OneWeb’s basic architecture are there because its originator, Greg Wyler, wanted sats that were just simple relays, not the far more complex, software-intensive and expensive spaceborne routers that Starlink birds are – and which Kuiper birds are also supposed to be. There were also his apparent initial hopes that he could sell his services to authoritarian governments that wanted to be able to use the ground station dependency of the network to keep it inside of their Great Firewalls. His hopes for the latter never reached fruition and SpaceX has contrived to distribute the initial expense of engineering its network over far larger production runs of sats as well as taking advantage of being able to launch at cost rather than at retail.

  With SpaceX having worked through five distinct generations of Starlink birds already and with gigantic number six waiting in the wings for a reliable Starship launcher that is likely no more than a few months away, it is small wonder, I suppose, that the matter of some kind of fleet refresh is now front and center among OneWeb’s owners. It will be interesting to see what emerges. Personally, I think any future OneWeb constellation that does not address all of its Gen-1’s shortcomings will have no real future at all.

  Starlink, in the interim, will continue to roll forward like Juggernaut’s Carriage, continuing to stretch its first-mover lead on the basis of continual improvement and capacity expansion and diminishing cost of ground terminals due to re-engineering and production volumes. Kuiper and OneWeb will be in an over-the-horizon tail chase for the foreseeable future. The future of neither looks particularly bright.