Le notable and adventurer. One hovers 36,000 kilometers from Earth, far from its tumults; the other goes 450 kilometers away, in a crowded and dangerous landscape. On Thursday, September 28, the shareholders of Eutelsat and OneWeb approved the marriage of the two companies, with the aim of creating a satellite Internet giant.
Created in 1977 by seventeen European countries to provide telecommunications and television transmission to the continent’s states, Eutelsat, privatized in 2001, prospered with the rise of small screen channels in a regulated and oligopolistic world. OneWeb, conversely, appeared in 2014 in the United Kingdom, in the booming world of satellite Internet, the appearance of minisatellites in low orbit considerably improving communication performance at a lower cost. Smaller, but quickly amounting to billions of euros. Bankruptcies therefore follow one another as quickly as creations.
Expand the offer
OneWeb was no exception and filed for bankruptcy in 2020. It was then taken over, sovereignty required, by the British state, with the help of the Indian conglomerate Bharti. But its future remains precarious in the face of the means deployed by the leading player in this new sector, Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company. When OneWeb sends 600 of its small machines into space, Starlink has already positioned 3,500 of them and ultimately intends to saturate our night sky with 30,000 boxes rotating above our heads. How to fight?
This is where the notable Eutelsat comes in. His subject is not money, nor loyal customers, but the future. Its television partners are less and less alone in homes. Internet television, popularized by Netflix, is eating up the audience of traditional channels. Even King Disney is considering divesting from its American channels to focus on streaming. For Eutelsat, it is therefore necessary to return closer to Earth.
The new set will be richer, but infinitely less than Starlink and Amazon, capable of finding tens of billions of dollars. At least it will be protected by the French and British governments, present in the capital of the new company, even if the first shareholder will be Indian. A sovereignty with variable geometry which has the merit of broadening the offer. The example of Ukraine, whose Internet is in the hands of Starlink, demonstrates the need.