back to article EU reaches agreement on satellite comms project: Opens Iris

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) …

  1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Meh

    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?

    1. codejunky Silver badge

      Re: How's ours getting on?

      @Will Godfrey

      "Weren't we supposed to have our very own all British setup in place (or at least in development) by now?"

      Are you saying the EU is following the UK's lead?

    2. Twanky
      Trollface

      Re: How's ours getting on?

      At €6 billion over 4 years the UK could easily afford it if we really wanted to. We're currently forecast to spend £88 billion per year in interest payments on previous borrowing - surely a bit more won't hurt?

    3. Rich 2 Silver badge

      Re: How's ours getting on?

      The problem with rolling our own is that it will mean yet another “standard” is out there. Where what we need, of course, is interoperability with the EU and NATO countries.

      So how useful would our own system actually be?

    4. Jellied Eel Silver badge

      Re: How's ours getting on?

      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.)

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Starlink speed

    ...deliver high-speed not-quite-as-high-speed-as-wired broadband connectivity (but way better than nothing)

  3. Charles Smith
    Big Brother

    Can't see the woods for the trees

    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.

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