France government invests big in Eutelsat-OneWeb
According to the satellite company Eutelsat-OneWeb, the French government has now committed more than a billion dollars in investment capital to the company, doubling its stake to almost 30%.
France would more than double its stake in Eutelsat to nearly 30% as part of a $1.56 billion capital raise backed by multiple shareholders, bolstering the French operator’s plans to refresh its OneWeb constellation amid Starlink’s growing dominance.
The funds would be raised in two parts before the end of the year, Eutelsat announced June 19, a day after the French military agreed to buy OneWeb services over 10 years in a deal potentially worth up to one billion euros ($1.15 billion).
OneWeb itself almost went bankrupt until it was saved by cash from a major Indian investor and the government of the United Kingdom. This new deal means that the merged company is largely controlled by France, the UK, and India.
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According to the satellite company Eutelsat-OneWeb, the French government has now committed more than a billion dollars in investment capital to the company, doubling its stake to almost 30%.
France would more than double its stake in Eutelsat to nearly 30% as part of a $1.56 billion capital raise backed by multiple shareholders, bolstering the French operator’s plans to refresh its OneWeb constellation amid Starlink’s growing dominance.
The funds would be raised in two parts before the end of the year, Eutelsat announced June 19, a day after the French military agreed to buy OneWeb services over 10 years in a deal potentially worth up to one billion euros ($1.15 billion).
OneWeb itself almost went bankrupt until it was saved by cash from a major Indian investor and the government of the United Kingdom. This new deal means that the merged company is largely controlled by France, the UK, and India.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
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Cortaro, AZ 85652
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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.