OneWeb

OneWeb, now the LEO arm of Eutelsat Group, is the counter-example to Starlink — deliberately so. It flies roughly a tenth as many satellites, sells almost nothing to consumers, and built its network to serve telcos, governments and mobility customers wholesale rather than to acquire subscribers directly.

It is also the only company in this directory to have gone bankrupt, been rescued by a national government, and emerged merged into a European GEO incumbent. That history is not trivia. It explains the strategy.

How It Got Here

OneWeb was the original LEO broadband challenger, founded before Starlink and backed by SoftBank, Airbus, Qualcomm and Virgin. It ran out of money in March 2020, filing for Chapter 11 with roughly seventy satellites in orbit and a constellation less than a fifth built.

What happened next is one of the more remarkable interventions in the sector’s history: the UK Government and Bharti Global bought the company out of bankruptcy for around $1 billion, a decision driven at least partly by the UK’s post-Brexit exclusion from the EU’s Galileo programme and a desire for a sovereign space asset. Deployment resumed, and global constellation coverage was completed in 2023.

In September 2023 OneWeb merged with Eutelsat, the French GEO operator, creating the first combined GEO–LEO operator of scale. The logic was straightforward: Eutelsat had a declining but cash-generative broadcast business and no LEO story; OneWeb had a LEO constellation and no balance sheet.

The Constellation

Metric	Position	Source type
Gen1 design	648 satellites (588 operational + in-orbit spares)	Company statement
Orbit	~1,200 km, polar, 12 planes	Regulatory filing
User spectrum	Ku-band; Ka-band gateways	Regulatory filing
Inter-satellite links	None in Gen1 — every hop must reach a ground gateway	Technical specification
Manufacturer	Airbus OneWeb Satellites joint venture	Company statement

Two design choices define — and constrain — the network. The 1,200 km altitude means each satellite sees far more of the Earth than a Starlink satellite at 550 km, so global coverage needs roughly a tenth as many spacecraft. The cost is latency, which is structurally higher, and capacity density, which is structurally lower.

The absence of inter-satellite links is the harder limitation. Without laser cross-links, traffic must reach a ground gateway within view of the same satellite serving the user — which means gateways in or near every region you want to serve, and severely constrained service over open ocean and other gateway-poor geographies. It is the single clearest technical gap against Starlink, and closing it is the central promise of Gen2.

Business Model

OneWeb sells capacity, not subscriptions. Distribution partners — telcos, ISPs, maritime and aviation service providers, governments — buy wholesale and own the end customer.

The strategic case for this is real: it avoids competing with Starlink for consumers, a fight OneWeb would lose on cost per bit, and it makes the company a partner rather than a threat to the incumbent telcos it sells through. The strategic cost is equally real: wholesale margins are thinner, revenue is intermediated, and the operator has no direct relationship with the people using the network.

Eutelsat’s combined GEO–LEO pitch — one supplier for broadcast, high-throughput GEO and low-latency LEO — is genuinely differentiated and is the company’s clearest reason to exist.

Financial Position

This is the pressure point. Eutelsat carries the cost of a legacy GEO fleet in structural decline, the cost of a LEO constellation that needs replacing, and the cost of building Gen2 — simultaneously.

In 2025 Eutelsat undertook a substantial capital increase, and the French state materially increased its shareholding to become the largest shareholder. Read plainly: European sovereign connectivity is now a strategic objective backed by public money, and Eutelsat is the vehicle. Investors should be clear-eyed that a company whose largest shareholder is a government will sometimes optimise for something other than return on capital.

IRIS² — The Sovereignty Play

Eutelsat is a core member of the SpaceRISE consortium, alongside SES and Hispasat, contracted to build IRIS² — the European Union’s multi-orbit sovereign constellation, a programme valued at around €10.6 billion under a concession signed in December 2024.

IRIS² is not primarily a commercial venture and should not be assessed as one. It is European strategic autonomy in secure government communications, procured as infrastructure. For Eutelsat it means anchor funding, political protection and a long-dated revenue floor — and a schedule set by European institutional processes rather than by markets.