Britain's OneWeb launches 36 broadband internet satellites from Russia

OneWeb has launched 36 satellites into orbit from a cosmodrome in the far east of Russia as part of the satellite firm's plans to deliver global high-speed internet access.

The launch on Thursday (25), carried out by Arianespace from the Vostochny cosmodrome, brought the number of in-orbit satellites to 146, part of a fleet designed to deliver high-speed, low-latency global connectivity, the satellite operator said.

OneWeb said this was the second in a five-launch programme that will enable its connectivity to reach all regions north of 50 degrees latitude by the middle of 2021.

"These services will cover the UK, Alaska, Northern Europe, Greenland, Iceland, the Arctic Seas and Canada, and will be switched on before the end of the year. OneWeb then intends to make global services available in 2022," it said.

OneWeb resumed flights in December after emerging from bankruptcy protection with $1 billion in equity investment from a consortium of the British government and India's Bharti Enterprises, its new owners.

The company is now owned principally by the Indian conglomerate Bharti Global and the UK government after they bought the enterprise out of bankruptcy last year.

Founded in 2014 by entrepreneur Greg Wyler, OneWeb planned to launch some 650 satellites into low earth orbit to provide universal internet but struggled to raise funds.

"We have what we call 'five to 50' (degrees latitude). So, that's five launches we need to do in order to get to this coverage of basically the south coast of the UK to the North Pole," OneWeb, chief executive,  Neil Masterson, told BBC News.

"By the end of June we will have completed those launches to enable us to be providing our service. But in total this year, we expect to be doing somewhere between eight and 10 launches."

OneWeb announced in January it had raised a further $400m from tech investor Softbank and satellite services specialist Hughes Network Systems. But this still leaves OneWeb short of about $1bn to finish the set-up of its first-generation constellation of 648 satellites.

OneWeb said that its testing programme is progressing well, and in a demonstration this month for the US department of defense claimed its satellites were providing downlink data rates of up to 500 megabits per second with a delay, or latency, in the internet connections as low as 32 milliseconds.

OneWeb's chief competitor in the internet mega-constellation business is Starlink, which is being set up by the Californian rocket company SpaceX.

Starlink, which has 1,320 satellites in orbit now after another launch on Wednesday (the architecture of its network requires more satellites than OneWeb) has already begun beta testing with high-latitude customers, reported the BBC.