Bharti backed satellite broadband company, OneWeb is aggressively working on its plan to provide global coverage by launching as many as 648 low earth orbit (LEO) satellites into space. The company has come a long way and has already launched over 358 LEO satellites into space. Out of the 358 satellites, 36 were launched today from the Vostochny Cosmodrome. According to an ET Telecom report, the company has started demonstrating live service to communicate how the satellite network’s hardware works and what its capabilities are across several applications.
OneWeb Has Demo Centre in London
For the unaware, OneWeb has a demo centre in its headquarters based in London. There’s another one in the Westcott Venture Park Innovation Centre in Buckinghamshire and a few more in Maryland, Alaska and Germantown, and Talkeetna in the United States (U.S.).
In a recent announcement, Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman, Bharti Enterprises said that OneWeb will become the first Satcom company in the nation to launch LEO satellites from India. OneWeb will take the help of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in it.
OneWeb looks to be on track for completing the goal of providing global coverage by 2022. It is the same year we can expect the company to mark its territory in India. As per old statements from Mittal, OneWeb won’t be keen on providing direct services to commercial customers. Instead, the satcom company is planning to partner with a telecom operator and then help the operator in expanding the network coverage.
This can be a huge boost to Bharti Airtel since right now the only major area where Airtel is behind Jio in terms of network performance is in coverage. This strategy of the company won’t just be exclusive to India but also to other nations. The biggest challenge for all the satcom players including Bharti Airtel will be of getting regulatory approvals for providing services in different countries.
