Hallucigenia wrote:Thanks - but that's another world away from the kind of "need enough to support a phone" kind of provisioning. Assuming it's the usual 1:1 ratio of pricing as it crosses the Atlantic (VAT covers most of the exchange rate difference) then you're looking at maybe £700 installation and £100/month for 300Mbps unlimited. Which is great, and would suit hotels etc, but is frankly more than most people need, certainly if they are used to next to nothing at the moment. The real requirement is for something that can get 10-20Mbps to everybody, at a price that everyone can afford.
The microwave service I experienced is this mob :
https://www.highlandwireless.co.uk/plans/£35 inc VAT for 50Mbps unlimited and £200 installation fee - and we were certainly getting in the low 40s. Through a combination of those kinds of schemes and improving 4G coverage (which I see is now quite good on one network nearby), I'm not sure how much demand there will be for the premium stuff outside hotels and the odd super-rich landowner.
If things go as planned Starlink won't be the only game in town, there will be a UK alternative too. In July last year the UK government invested $500 million to buy a 45% stake in OneWeb (
https://www.engadget.com/uk-oneweb-sate ... 05051.html). The other major stake holder is Indian telecoms company Bharti that also invested $500m presumably for another 45%. Despite not being the majority owner I did read in some reports that the UK has something similar to a golden share in that it can vet and potentially veto changes in investors and can also vet and veto customers allowed to use the network.
The reporting at the time focussed a fair amount on the possibility of using the OneWeb constellation to host a sovereign UK GPS solution since at the time there was much Brexit furore over the UK being ejected from the EU Galileo GPS project. Even if that doesn't happen (and there are challenges with hosting a GPS system in low Earth orbit) OneWeb already has satellites up, is growing the constellation most recently by another 34 satellites this weekend (
https://www.space.com/arianespace-sozyu ... te-mission), and demonstrated a working connection back in 2019 (
https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... -new-test/).
I suspect the UK government might well need to inject additional funding to build out the constellation to the initial target size but with the sort of money being talked about to get broadband to all UK communities, e.g. - "In December 2020, the Government announced £5 billion of funding to support the roll-out of gigabit capable broadband in ‘the hardest to reach 20% of the country’" [ Source:
https://www.rsnonline.org.uk/are-rural- ... gh-the-net ] - another billion dollars or so into OneWeb might deliver more bang for the buck. Based on those early OneWeb demos it probably wouldn't deliver gigabit levels but certainly enough for anyone to be able to video conference etc and definitely enough to host very limited bandwidth "need enough to support a phone" connections. Also I suspect the MoD might get tapped for some part of the additional funding if required since the utility to the UK military and intelligence communities of a fully functioning global UK-controlled network would be immense.
A lot of initial reporting was branding the investment crazy, partly because of the technical uncertainty of it being a viable replacement for Galileo but also perhaps because of the rumours that it was a Dominic Cummings project, but if one just looks at the potential as an alternative to Starlink to fill in rural broadband not-spots, offer another alternative for basic phone replacement when the copper network goes away, and the possible military and intelligence uses, and the ability to use it as part of the UK's foreign aid and humanitarian initiatives by offering free or heavily subsidised connections in poorer countries or disaster areas, I think it might end up being quite a good move provided that the broadband technology works as expected regardless of whether a LEO GPS system is ever also able to be implemented.
- Julian