UK government shakes magic money tree, finds $500m to buy a stake in struggling satellite firm OneWeb The ongoing saga of OneWeb and the UK's ambition to be a major space player took another twist today with the confirmation that $500m will be splurged by Whitehall on the satelite biz. OneWeb, which filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year, has been the subject of speculation in recent weeks as bidders circled. A …
Think of how much time and trouble you’ll save. Now HMGov won’t have to go to the trouble of warrants or even just leaning on the ISP, they’ll have everything they need right in front of them. You’re a meanie for wanting poor innocent civil servants to actually work for a living. Bad suspect. No cookie.
I'm sure it will be possible (at least in what passes for their minds) to mandate that only VPNs which have suitably backdoored encryption will be allowed. And when the keys leak and someone compromises all the banks and takes down the financial system, why, that won't be anything to do with them, it will be the filthy criminals fault.
Dominic CummingsThe UK government: not even the smartest people in an empty room.
Crikey, half a billion smackers conjured out of the ether, just like that. Who do you talk to to get a relatively fair share of that sort of largesse? Or do they come to you with an attractive offer it would be ungracious to deny and refuse?
Inquiring minds would like to know if there are any sort of prime or sub-prime rules in play for those who think there be rules to be followed? :-)
Perhaps they decided on a different way to funnel money to Branson instead of saving his airline.
Branson-backed OneWeb to raise $1bn for its satellite internet mega-constellation
Perhaps they decided on a different way to funnel money to Branson instead of saving his airline.Branson-backed OneWeb to raise $1bn for its satellite internet mega-constellation
Who's to say it is not a Perfect Viaduct ... and as the Virgin Venture that it is ..... most APT that Sir Richard be ACTive at the Forefront of Such Innovative Novel Fields.
You might like to ask him what he would do with such a powerful acquisition/merger/acquaintance and does he have any specific plans for employment/deployment/enjoyment ..... although all of that might be classified sensitive intellectual property and secure strictly need to know information?
Just for clarification, the article states :
"While at first glance, trying to force a mega-constellation of communication satellites in Low Earth Orbit to perform the positioning duties of a few purpose-built spacecraft in higher orbits may seem risky, it could be made to work."
Who is stating it could be made to work - is it the UK Government, or someone with the technical aptitude who has made a comment somewhere ???
To me, $500m is a lot of money to speculate upon for something that "could be made to work".
I find it hard to see how it could possibly be made to work. For a start: don't all GPS spacecraft carry an atomic clock? None of those launched so far have one, surely. And you would need to make a system that was extremely similar to GPS (as the Glonass and the new Chinese ones are) and use an adjacent waveband, otherwise existing chips in GPS receivers and mobile phones around the world simply won't work on them. And then you need a set of ground stations to track their position and upload the orbital data to them at quite frequent intervals. With a couple of dozen spacecraft in highish orbits that's feasible, though surely not cheap to do. With a vast number of low-earth orbit spacecraft that will surely just not be doable at any reasonable cost. Or have I missed something?
Phone chipsets rarely support additional services that weren't around when the chip was designed. No matter how a new navigation system is implemented, whether almost identical to GPS or entirely different, a new chip will be needed to receive from it. The only exception would be a system which augments an existing one, similar to how QZSS overlays upon GPS for Japan. As for the clocks, that would be a problem. While they could put the clocks in the new satellites and reprogram them, they could have also put clocks in their own satellites without buying this company. While a navigation system isn't impossible, it would seem to be a strange step to take if that was the primary goal. Given their discussion of broadband, perhaps they have other goals in mind. Whether those goals make sense or are in any way useful is another question.
Ordinary people in the UK can go on using the US or EU GPS for service similar to current. What the UK won't get that way is super accurate positioning and/or military applications. I presume that using these satellites for that will indeed require new fancy equipment at the point of use.
The other aspect of military usage is more redundancy is better ( China is developing anti-satellite warfare hardware ).
If Britain and her allies have access to a less accurate system which has hundreds of cheap satellites, it would be much harder to take it out than the existing GNS systems which have a handful.
Even if the resolution isn't perfect - an ICBM missing by a few feet is still going to knacker whatever it was aiming at.
"The other aspect of military usage is more redundancy is better ( China is developing anti-satellite warfare hardware )."
While redundancy can be useful, it also increases complexity. There are so many if's and but's in this is it hard to know where to begin. Basically it feels like someone aw the word satellite on for sale notice and said, that will do. Also not that phone satellites are unlikely to hardened to military spec nor meet military encryption capability.
"If Britain and her allies have access to a less accurate system which has hundreds of cheap satellites, it would be much harder to take it out than the existing GNS systems which have a handful."
I'm not sure Britain ha any allies left. An inaccurate GPS system is an oxymoron
"Even if the resolution isn't perfect - an ICBM missing by a few feet is still going to knacker whatever it was aiming at."
ICBM's are quite happy using inertial navigation and star tracking technology. Your smart missile designed to hit a small bunker window is less resiliant ti inaccracy
> I'm not sure Britain ha any allies left.
Urgh.
> An inaccurate GPS system is an oxymoron
All GNS systems are inaccurate to a point. In some applications the nearest cm matters. In others, the odd yard isn't a big deal. If this constellation can provide redundancy in exchange for a little bit of accuracy, that isn't necessarily a bad tradeoff.
> Your smart missile designed to hit a small bunker window is less resiliant ti inaccracy
It would have to be a very small bunker if a yard makes a difference. Obviously it depends on the accuracy - if it is hundreds of yards that's another thing altogether.
"What the UK won't get that way is super accurate positioning and/or military applications."
This has been the stupidest part of the whole thing all along. The "super secret, amazingly accurate military system" is not actually any more accurate than the freely available services. In fact, its spec is actually worse than the basic open service and much worse than the high accuracy service. The difference is that it's supposed to be more resistant to jamming, and they promise not to turn it off in the middle of a war.
In practice, jamming is irrelevant when you're dropping bombs on people with AKs from thousands of feet up, and as long as we don't suddenly decide to invade France it's fairly unlikely that they're going to threaten to shut everything down to stop us using it. The normal commerical services are perfectly adequate for anything the UK plans on doing, military or otherwise. The problem is nothing to do with how useful the system is, it's purely about being upset for not being allowed in the club, despite us being the ones who decided to leave.
https://gssc.esa.int/navipedia/index.php/GALILEO_Performances
It seems to me the satellites don't need an accurate clock. All that's needed is a ground-level array of receivers at known locations which each note the time from their point of view that every satellite's last clock edge arrived at their location. That doesn't need long-term accuracy, we only need the delta time.
The 'where am I' receiver does the same, and compares the time distribution it sees with that of each receiver in the array, interpolating as necessary. That needs a broadband connection, but that's what these things do, right ?
Well, that has several downsides. Basically, you're hoping to compare a lot of latencies between the satellites, requiring the device at the other end be informed of relatively large sets of data. That would make the system more delicate and require more data from the satellites. It would also make the system a lot more dependent on fixed ground locations, which isn't necessarily the most desirable setup. While those satellites are capable of broadband speeds, doing that would usually require larger receiving dishes and more power output. For things like ships and planes, you probably wouldn't find it that hard. For portable units used by field troops, that approach might be inadvisable. Still, if they intend to use the constellation for this purpose, they may find that my concerns are not that troubling. Still, if I were them and wanted to do the navigation with these satellites, I'd start by considering just putting the clocks in the ones that haven't yet been launched. They're planning to send thousands up; it's fine if 80 don't have clocks.
Like GSM in order for the satellite internet to work all transmissions from various ground stations must arrive in sync. Therefore the ground transceiver must know the exact range to the satellite.
The problem as you correctly point out is that we would not have an exact position for the satellite.
You could potentially model this quite accurately and transmit the ephemeris data out of band.
Also you can have fixed ground stations verifying the exact position of each satellite the same way GPS does but have the clocks on the ground.
It will be clunky and probably never make it into consumer GPS but if what you want is a solution for the military in case we go to war with France then probably it will do the job
It appears to be important to know exactly what is meant by "It can be made to work". I've been poking around reading various articles and papers as I think up new keywords to look for. Best paper I've found so far involved using the Iridium satellites and suggested a likely accuracy (CEP) of around 10km, with various post-processing (which seemed to be mostly a case of waiting a while to collect more data) that could be reduced to around 400m. So yes, it can be made to work, but...
That's the brilliant part of the plan, made possible by ignoring experts, we don't launch them into orbit
The satellites will be placed at strategic points around the coast on top of tall buildings previously holding lights, from which they will broadcast a radio beam. By intersecting two of these beams one will be able to perform long range navigation
Expert on Twitter says it won't work. If we believe experts.
Yes, the quango with vested funding interests said it could be made to work (please give us more money so we can investigate how, we'll get back to you in a few years) but the UK Space Agency said it won't work:
OneWeb’s network has been described as unsuitable for navigational purposes by the UK’s own space agency, according to internal documents cited by the Daily Telegraph. A spokesman for the agency declined to comment on the documents.
And here's the article itself, showing its ankles from behind the paywall.
I think this was discussed in an earlier post.
It can work fine - provided they have approriate transmitters.... They dont even need 4 atomic clocks, really, if there are enough of them, with some basestations to provide synchronization..
The gps sats we use today are so expensive because they have a decade design life, are in high orbit, and have to work - there are only 24 operational - but they have a wide area effect each (usually 8 or so can be seen). In LEO, there may be up to 80 in orbit and active for GPS duties at any one time- that improves accuracy round skyscrapers etc - and high latitudes (above 60 degrees, GPS starts to drop efefctiveness) - where traditional gps doesnt work
Signal strength in LEO could also be useful for blocking Chinese russian or US gps analogues (if tensions are ongoing in a particular theatre) - and the shear number provides resilience against anti satellite shenanigans....
WHo knows for sure what the future requirements could be?
GEC Marconi
Oh those were the days.There were circuit diagrams done by hand on drafting film, and the smell of the blueprint duplicators....
Not everything there was a failure. I have boxes still flying and still good. BOMIS (Bill Of Materials Incoice System) that ran in the ICL mainframes that were turned off for y2k still far out performs what I work with now, as did the paperless production history dossiers even running on Apricots!).
It's true that there were a few duds along the way. The done that put on so much weight it couldn't carry its own wheels, the Lidar that didn't, etc.
To me, $500m is a lot of money to speculate upon for something that "could be made to work".
Which is why they're spending $500m to rescue a company that can provide rural broadband. The whole "could be made to work for positioning" is just idle left-field speculation, and not the reason for the purchase.
"Which is why they're spending $500m to rescue a company that can provide rural broadband. The whole "could be made to work for positioning" is just idle left-field speculation, and not the reason for the purchase."
So basically nationalization of rural broadband services, because that always goes well. You also have to ask the question of why it went bust in the 1st place
Have they really just spent half a billion on state-owned rural satellite broadband? Rural broadband is dirt cheap, if you do it right.
Source in several papers say they did buy it for GPS-like services.
But nobody from government has stood up and said why they've just spent half a billion on something out of the blue.
"But nobody from government has stood up and said why they've just spent half a billion on something out of the blue."
Well, technically, several people and documents from U.K. government did say exactly why they bought it. It's just such a shame that basically none of them agree on what that reason was. This article quotes someone who says the reason is broadband. The article from a few days ago links to a report that says it's mostly navigation. Comments sections for both articles link to articles saying any number of other things.
Certainly, using the constellation for broadband provision would make sense (particularly for those UK households unable to get decent speeds). It is, after all, what it was designed to do.
Given how tiny the UK is, you could easily provide the same service with a few of Google's dirigibles. Satellites are designed for covering large areas of the earth with their signals.
Oh, hang on. Is that the 19:21 Gravy Train? I have to catch that one! If you fine it, mine's the one with "A Short History of Barnard Castle" in the pocket but you can keep that.
Given how tiny the UK is, you could easily provide the same service with a few of Google's dirigibles
Google's dirigibles are on hold whilst they finalise cloning Christoper Walken and Grace Jones. Meanwhile, media tycoon 'Elliot Carver' pauses keel-hauling his crewmembers for surfing pron, calls Mr Bond and asks to quote him happy..
Meanwhile, back in the (su)real world, there's stuff like this-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u9kaKVgHLc
£733,000 for 100Mbps Internet to your floating gin palace. And you thought BT was bad.. Which is one of the markets both OneWeb and Starlink probably want to disrupt. Or HMG can save some money given the number of ships, remote locations like embassies etc that need/want broadband. Plus of course rural folks in the UK can help subsidise it. Don't forget we have outposts like the Falkland Islands, where Islanders can't easily get decent Internet connectivity. Oh, and the Commonwealth countries may find services interesting.
So there's potential to save taxpayers a large chunk of change, along with superyacht owning tax-dodgers. And if it ends up making money, HMG takes profits or can flog off it's investment at a later date. Until then, I guess negotiating with Bharti will prove.. interesting, along with managing any US protectionism.
Quote
And if it ends up making money, HMG takes profits or can flog off it's investment at a later date.
Correction if it ends up making money , then it will be flogged off to the governments best mates from university for about 40% of the actual market value ASAP
Then instantly sold on for 100% of the actual value with best mate making a 'donation' to the tory party, and getting more government contracts/sell offs/glittery bongs as a result
Correction if it ends up making money , then it will be flogged off to the governments best mates from university for about 40% of the actual market value ASAP
Was that what happened when a certain G.Brown flogged off a lot of gold? And later much of the UK's nuclear industry.. both at bargain prices.
As for best mates.. not sure if it's a good or bad thing that many of those tend to be PPE types rather than engineers or scientists.
"... one of the markets both OneWeb and Starlink probably want to disrupt. "
You can guess who's being disrupted by who's astroturfing the objections. US telcos outside of the major metropolitan centres feature highly in that list
There's also the issue of satellite broadband constellations bypassing national firewalls. I could see legislation being passed REQUIRING that UK users only use the UK service, in order that the "porn/piracy wall(*)" stays up
(*) When the porn wall manages to block things like the Saracens rugby club with no explanation, let alone political sites criticising porn wall policies, one has to wonder what they're ACTUALLY blocking and why.
There's also the issue of satellite broadband constellations bypassing national firewalls. I could see legislation being passed REQUIRING that UK users only use the UK service, in order that the "porn/piracy wall(*)" stays up
UK doesn't have a national firewall. It does have a Communications Act that includes operator assistance requirements.. Much like most countries. So to sell services there, you generally need to obtain a telco licence, and that generally includes support for lawful intercept. But some countries also try to licence operating receiving kit, ie VSAT dishes, but judging by the number installed on walls and roofs, it doesn't seem widely enforced. Even when 12ga decommissioning could be done cheap.
"Oh, and the Commonwealth countries may find services interesting."
Commonwealth interest in "made in Britain" products can be exemplified in the saga of General Motors attempting to relaunch the Vauxhall brand in Australasia during 1998-9 - nobody would touch those Vectras until they were rebadged as Opels (NZ) or Holdens (Australia)
Ford had similar problems selling Mondeos until they provided assurances the things were built in Germany, not the UK
Where's the money being saved? I see £ 500 million being spent initially.
Thing about investments is you don't expect them to pay off tomorrow. OneWeb (and Starlinks) problem is ludicrous up-front costs before you can generate any meaningful revenues. Which was the problem when SoftBank discovered WeWork wasn't a great investment and pulled the plug on financing this.. And other ventures. Burning cash is fun until there's no more cash to burn.
But there's some.. optimism around this job, like developing Cape Cornwall aka Newquay Airport so satellites can be launched from there. There's still a bunch of launches booked (and possibly paid for) from Arianne, and more will be required.
But it's also known how much the governemt spends on communications, and a chunk of that money might be shunted to OneWeb. There's also the potential to sell rural broadband to rural EU citizens (of which there are many) because Gallileo's just a satnav system. Canada's also expressed interest, and presumably other bidders didn't have such a negative outlook for the future as some here.
Having an Indian telco on board suggests that at least one other bit of the coverage will be used and I'd guess they plan to rent out other parts as well.
But "increase the satellite count to 48,000"? Coming soon - HMG statement "We will be the world leader in Dyson spheres".
But "increase the satellite count to 48,000"? Coming soon - HMG statement "We will be the world leader in Dyson spheres".
Needs lots of satellites due to spot beams, and so the network can achieve full global coverage! Which given 2/3ds of that globe is water, kinda limits the market.. But then being LEOs, you need lots of satellites so they can orbit over places where you do (or might) have customers. Then there's placing downlink facilities so you can actually offer the lower latency benefits vs GEO VSAT systems.
As for Dyson.. I've have it on good authority* that the plan has solved the meshing problem. Satellites will be meshed via Cat6 rebar, then shotcreted from lunar cement works. Thus providing a complete ICBM shield.. Hopefully with plenty of vents.
*ie me, and my wandering mind..
The Japanese have an alternative to GPS, named Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS) or 'Michibiki' (みちびき), which currently provides an augmentation to the USA's GPS locally for Japan, but with the addition of a small number of additional satellites can operate independently of GPS.
The satellites have an interesting inclined geosynchronous orbit that means that the ground track is an analemma shape ('figure of eight') over Japan and Australia.
They are interesting in that they do not require on-board atomic clocks. As stated in the Wikipedia article:
QZSS timekeeping and remote synchronizationAlthough the first generation QZSS timekeeping system (TKS) will be based on the Rb clock, the first QZSS satellites will carry a basic prototype of an experimental crystal clock synchronization system. During the first half of the two year in-orbit test phase, preliminary tests will investigate the feasibility of the atomic clock-less technology which might be employed in the second generation QZSS.
The mentioned QZSS TKS technology is a novel satellite timekeeping system which does not require on-board atomic clocks as used by existing navigation satellite systems such as BeiDou, Galileo, GPS, GLONASS or NavIC system. This concept is differentiated by the employment of a synchronization framework combined with lightweight steerable on-board clocks which act as transponders re-broadcasting the precise time remotely provided by the time synchronization network located on the ground. This allows the system to operate optimally when satellites are in direct contact with the ground station, making it suitable for a system like the Japanese QZSS. Low satellite mass and low satellite manufacturing and launch cost are significant advantages of this system. An outline of this concept as well as two possible implementations of the time synchronization network for QZSS were studied and published in Remote Synchronization Method for the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System[15] and Remote Synchronization Method for the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System: study of a novel satellite timekeeping system which does not require on-board atomic clocks.[16][non-primary source needed]
The article links to a PhD thesis on the topic which has also been published as a book:
Media articles:
SpaceNews: Japan mulls seven-satellite QZSS system as a GPS backup
Spacewatch Asia-Pacific: Japan Prepares for GPS Failure with Quasi-Zenith Satellites
So it seems there are possibilities of viable satellite navigation system approaches other than GPS, which could potentially be bought off-the-shelf from the Japanese.
If it turns out Oneweb satellites aren't suitable for anything other than broadband, its a lot of taxpayer money spaffed on a bankrupt company, to supply a few thousand homes and business that can't get decent broadband via fixed lines or mobile.
How many miles of fibre or 5G masts could be installed for those rural areas for that amount of money?
The New Zealand solution to the Opnreach Problem was simple:
"We won't provide any more money until lines and dialtone are two entirely separated companies, with separate ownership, headquarters, shareholdings and boards of directors - and don't think of simply splitting off the lines company into a lines "maintenance" company - ownership of the LINES must be entlrely separated from other services"
That was done specifically in response to documenting how BT was and is abusing the UK market and thealmost immediate transformation of their version of Openreach could be likened to the company having had a cattle prod jammed up the nether reaches.
Now the old incumbent dialtone company is looking extremely ill whilst the lines company is quite robust and well respected for their "we'll sell access to anyone - equally" approach.
OneWeb would make an excellent upgrade for the UK Skynet and other government VSAT services around the world. By spending $500M the UK will have priority access on a global, high bandwidth satellite network. Also having a partner to flog spare capacity to other users they might even make a profit on the deal! You would have difficulty shoving more than a couple geostationary satellites up for that money.
I don't think the location services figure high on the priority list for this project, it may be possible to upgrade some of the satellites in the future before launch to add high accuracy clocks etc, but that would just be "icing on the cake" if it could be made to work.
The only thing they really need to do at this stage is to move the command/control infrastructure to the UK and harden the network.
It all looks like a really good deal, I can't remember the last time I said that the UK govt did something good, but this is a tick in their favour.
Define excellent upgrade. As far as i can see you are defining two opposing objectives
1) provide a cheap global broadband service
2) provide a military grade communication system
Sorry, you cannot have both. choose 1) and the military would not touch it with a barge pole. Choose 2) and the costs go up and you are not commercially competitive.
As for adding GPS on later, it there is no proof that such a system would work and also add costs
It looks like a awful deal, which could have the capacity to create financial liabilities far down the line.
Sequence:
(1) Fuck off you Euro twats we don't need you!
(2) What do you mean we can't use the system? We designed and built most of it!
(3) Fuck you double, we'll build our own!
(4) How much?
(5) Oh shit, what do we do now? We need a distraction.
(6) Hey, this firm does satellites. Close enough. Hint that it could do navigation as well and they'll be too busy arguing about it to remember the original cock up.
And, dear reader, the rest is history.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
