How's ours getting on?
Weren't we supposed to have our very own all British setup in place (or at least in development) by now?
Europe is constructing its own satellite constellation to guarantee communications services for the region, following an agreement between the European Parliament and EU member states to invest €2.4 billion ($2.481 billion) in the program. The IRIS² (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite) …
We do. Sort of.
So once upon a time there was OneWeb, who jumped on the satellite broadband bandwagon. But having dealt with them in the past, had no real idea about how to sell their service. So it went kinda titsup.com and ended up being bought by HMG and Bharti. Then, in July, OneWeb merged with France's Eutelsat, with HMG ending up with 10% and some controlling interest.
So in a sensible world, the EU programme would basically be EUtelsat, because it's already mostly there. There was a minor hiccup given OneWeb's constellation wasn't quite complete, and it had been launching on Russian birds, but ISTR that's switched to SpacX.
However in EU-world, it'll probably mean spaffing a lot of cash to design something new, wonderful and ends up competing with Eutelsat, because reinventing wheels is sooo much more fun!
(And in rant mode, it'd be better to spend the money to create a sane sales/delivery channel to make it easy for people to buy services. I had several meetings with OneWeb back in the day when I wanted to be able to just bundle fixed & satellite into a simple, standard package to retail/wholesale. Their then manglement seemed to really struggle with the concept that making it easy to buy would make it easy to grow their revenues. So I wasn't at all suprised when the ch.11 thing happened.)
As Elon say's; if you want to use SkyNet cut down the trees in your garden. This is just another way to avoid laying fibre to deliver Internet. The problem arises when Russia/China/USA decides to take out the LEO satellite network and triggers a Kessler Syndrome event.