Bharti Enterprises asks ISRO for help developing OneWeb user terminals

 

Bharti Enterprises asks ISRO for help developing OneWeb user terminals


Correction: An earlier version of this story  incorrectly stated that Bharti Enterprises is currently demonstrating connections between OneWeb satellites and BMW cars with less than 32 milliseconds of signal lag. OneWeb spokeswoman Katie Dowd said Aug. 21 that OneWeb’s demonstration with BMW concluded in the spring. The tests did not involve automobiles, and achieved 35-45 milliseconds of signal lag.

WASHINGTON — Indian telecommunications giant Bharti Enterprises is asking India’s space agency to help develop user terminals for OneWeb and to collaborate on providing broadband across the country. 

Sunil Mittal, the billionaire chairman of Bharti Enterprises, said during an Aug. 20 webinar hosted by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) that OneWeb should start providing broadband early in 2022 from a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites, and that plans are underway to build two or three gateway stations in India for domestic services. 

“OneWeb is going to be the world’s first LEO satellite constellation flying about 648 satellites at 1,200 kilometers, covering every inch of the globe,” Mittal said. 

Bharti Enterprises and the British government are buying OneWeb, pledging in July to each invest $500 million to revive the bankrupt venture. However, neither Bharti nor the British government previously indicated that the constellation would have the same number of satellites OneWeb planned before entering Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March.  

OneWeb has 74 satellites in orbit, and will need many more launches plus the rollout of several ground stations before it can provide global service. Prior to filing for bankruptcy, OneWeb was targeting global service in 2021. 

Mittal didn’t say when launches would resume, but said the plan is for OneWeb to “start to deliver these services in the early part of ‘22 once the constellation is going to be up.” 

Test services will start in late 2021 once OneWeb’s coverage extends over arctic regions and northern European countries, Mittal said. 

With that coverage, “we will have started to test a lot of ground and user terminals,” Mittal said. “It is here we would like to see ISRO’s hand and support in work to develop user terminals which cater to the needs of Indian requirements.”

The nonexistence of affordable user terminals for high-speed consumer broadband from LEO satellites is a significant concern for OneWeb and the satellite industry. Current user terminals that can work with LEO broadband satellites are either based on flat, phased-array antennas or mechanical tracking antennas with two dishes — both expensive approaches. 

Antenna challenges notwithstanding, Mittal said Bharti Enterprises has “already earmarked a lot of areas in India where the benefits of this LEO constellation broadband connectivity will be made available.” 

“We will also seek to build a very strong cooperation agreement with ISRO to see the combination of a GEO-LEO constellation for Indian territory is put to use where we can combine the strength and capacity requirements of the nation,” he added. 

ISRO provides satellite broadband across India through its fleet of domestically built GSAT geostationary satellites. The agency operates 15 geostationary communications satellites, according to the ISRO website, which provide broadband and broadcast services. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon

Image
You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune A company wants to use an advanced balloon to fly customers from Earth’s surface in Alaska to the highest reaches of the planet’s atmosphere. Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune,  The Anchorage Daily News  reported on Sunday. The balloon rides will be manned by a flight crew taking eight passengers in a pressurized capsule suspended beneath a hydrogen balloon the size of a football stadium. Each passenger could pay an estimated $125,000 for a six-hour journey. Mark Lester, CEO of Alaska Aerospace Corp., said the high-altitude rides will be available from Kodiak in a few years and will ...
Read more

Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies

Image
Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies WASHINGTON — The NASA Advisory Council has recommended that NASA review its existing planetary protection guidelines to balance the needs of science and exploration, an effort that could set the stage for a similar revision at the international level. The council, during a two-day meeting at NASA Headquarters Dec. 10–11, adopted a recommendation calling on NASA to establish an interdisciplinary committee of experts to review the agency’s current requirements for preventing contamination of other worlds by NASA spacecraft as well as any contamination of the Earth by materials brought back from those worlds. “NASA should establish a multidisciplinary task force of experts from industry, the scientific community, and relevant government agencies, to develop U.S. policies that properly balance the legitimate need to protect against the harmful contamination of the Earth or other celestial bodies with the scientific, social, and e...
Read more

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought Jupiter  appears to have more water than anyone expected. Newly released data from  NASA's Juno probe shows that water may make up about 0.25% of the molecules in the atmosphere over Jupiter's equator. While that doesn't sound like much, the calculation is based on a prevalence of water's components, hydrogen and oxygen, three times more than at the sun. The new measurements Juno obtained are much higher than a previous mission suggested. The surprise result has scientists delving deep again into results from  NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter , which obtained drier results in 1995 when engineers deliberately threw the spacecraft into Jupiter's atmosphere. (Galileo was low on fuel and NASA didn't want to take the chance, even if it was a slight one, of the spacecraft accidentally crashing on a potentially habitable icy moon.) Reconciling the results from Galileo and Juno is key for sc...
Read more