Will Eutelsat be able to replace Starlink?

The European Commission is looking for an alternative communication system to Starlink for Ukraine, the commission's representative, Thomas Renier, said on 4 March. According to him, the alternative could be the existing GOVSATCOM integrated satellite communication system. On the other hand, there was information about ongoing negotiations between the EU and the Eutelsat company, which could provide Ukraine with satellite Internet via the OneWeb satellite constellation.

However, all these “beautiful” statements have a number of nuances, Eutelsat is at least ready to provide its services only on a paid basis and according to experts, the OneWeb system is significantly inferior to the free of charge provided by Starlink.

OneWeb has the following disadvantages:

► The first disadvantage is that OneWeb satellites are located at twice the altitude of Starlink satellites - at an altitude of 1200 kilometers.
Starlink satellites are at altitudes of 450-550 kilometers. And communicators know that the greater the distance between the receiver and the transmitter, the signal strength falls in proportion to the square. That is, twice the distance - four times less power. Accordingly, the quality characteristics of communication decreases all the time
► The second disadvantage of OneWeb is the number of devices.
There are 640 devices in its system, while Starlink already has 7 thousand. Thus, the density and volume of traffic is significantly higher.
► The third disadvantage is OneWeb's lack of inter-satellite link.
Musk has data transmission between satellites. That is, there is an inter-satellite communication channel. This allows information to be transmitted very quickly between remotely located consumers without dropping it to Earth. OneWeb has no inter-satellite communication channel. So it needs to use ground-based pairing stations to transfer information between any two consumers. That's quite a bit of infrastructure

Despite the fact that both the European OneWeb and the American Starlink were developed in 2019. The European satellite system produced by Eutelsat is not only much inferior to the American one in terms of the number of satellites and their signal strength, but also requires a large amount of infrastructure for data transmission. Moreover, the use of OneWeb will be very costly.

Because of these disadvantages, even if OneWeb is launched, the system is unlikely to replace Starlink.

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