Musk Rival Mittal Targets Global Satellite Broadband by Mid-2022
Musk Rival Mittal Targets Global Satellite Broadband by Mid-2022
(Bloomberg) -- Telecommunications tycoon Sunil Mittal said the satellite startup he rescued from bankruptcy with the U.K. government will be offering global broadband services within 18 months.
The new target for OneWeb heats up a space race against two other billionaire entrepreneurs who are rushing to offer internet from low-earth orbit satellites -- Space Exploration Technologies Corp. founder Elon Musk and Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos.
”By May-June of 2022, which is less than 18 months, OneWeb’s constellation will cover the entire globe, every square inch of this world,” the founder and chairman of Bharti Enterprises said Wednesday at a conference hosted by the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union and Saudi Arabian communication regulator CITC.
Musk has built a formidable lead using his own SpaceX rockets to launch hundreds of satellites for his Starlink constellation since OneWeb went into bankruptcy in March, and is now testing the service with potential customers.
Unlike OneWeb, Starlink’s service isn’t set to cover the extreme north and south of the planet for now, offering its rival a potential niche serving governments, shipping and aviation in remote regions.
“We welcome competition,” Mittal said. “We fight like hell in the marketplace.” Later generations of OneWeb satellites could provide global positioning capabilities, he said.
OneWeb has put 74 of an initial 648 planned spacecraft in orbit so far, and plans to resume launches this month. It’s not yet secured all the funding it needs to complete the constellation.
Mittal put the overall cost at between $5.5 billion and $7 billion and said the remaining shortfall is between $2 billion and $2.5 billion -- with half of that to be covered by Bharti and the British government. As for raising further capital with other investors, he said: “I don’t see that to be an issue.”
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