OneWeb is targeting the rollout of commercial services in November for customers north of 50 degrees latitude in Canada, the UK and Northern Europe.
SpaceQ spoke with David van Dyke, Director of Carrier & Enterprise Canada about the status of rolling-out services in Canada.
OneWeb, SpaceX and Telesat are all vying to connect Canada’s rural and remote regions and are executing different business plans to make it happen.
For OneWeb, this means it won’t be selling services directly to consumers.
“We are focused 100% on selling through partners, so we’re not gonna sell direct like our competitors, we’re not a consumer play at all. We are effectively in a wholesale model. And we’re offering what I would call commercial grade conductivity.”
van Dyke is one of three employees in Canada. It’s a low number at the moment, and van Dyke didn’t join OneWeb until April of this year. He did say that they are planning on “expanding our footprint here in Canada” and that the UK headquartered company had already hired more than 400 people since last December.
OneWeb recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Northwestel for commercial services in northern areas. This is just one of many deals the company is working on.
van Dyke said that they were “working with tier one telcos across Canada, and very large international systems integrator types, and it’s a lot of commercial opportunities. We’re also focused on commercial consumer broadband connectivity for communities. So rural communities that have nothing today, we’re partnering with provincial and territorial governments to support indigenous communities, we’re working with Inuit bands … to provide broadband to their communities.”
While OneWeb is targeting the rollout of commercial services in November, it’s up to their partners to decide when to turn on the flow of data that will reach the customer. In fact, for some customers, they won’t even know that their connectivity is coming from OneWeb satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). They’ll just notice an increase in bandwidth and capability.
OneWeb is also targeting the rollout of services mid-2022 for the rest of Canada and the United States.
While there weren’t many details in the MOU recently announced with Northwestel, the companies did state that they “will collaborate on opportunities to deliver new connectivity services to remote mines, businesses and governments across Canada’s north using OneWeb’s low Earth orbit satellite backbone.”
A strong competitor to OneWeb, will be Telesat. Telesat is also not selling direct to consumer. It too has an MOU with Northwestel. It also has the advantage of being a Canadian company. It’s one disadvantage though is that OneWeb will beat them by well over a year in getting connectivity to customers. OneWeb will need that time to lock in customers.