Intellian announced that it will be starting production of a wide range of dedicated user terminals for the global low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications provider OneWeb, ready for delivery in 2021 and beyond.
OneWeb is focused on scaling its satellite constellation to begin commercial services starting at the end of next year. Coverage will extend to the UK, Alaska, Canada, Northern Europe, Greenland, Iceland, and the Arctic Seas.
Intellian announced its partnership with OneWeb to build terminals for both the fixed enterprise and maritime markets in 2019 and OneWeb’s keenly-awaited revival has enabled the two organisations to recommence their partnership.
Intellian’s agreement with OneWeb encompasses the production of a wide range of dedicated OneWeb user terminal types with a variety of antenna sizes. These terminals are designed to facilitate services and suit customer’s application requirements across various sectors, including cellular backhaul, enterprise, rural broadband, telecommunications, telemedecine, schools, hospitals, agriculture, mining, government and maritime, including merchant shipping, oil and gas exploration, leisure and fishing. In addition, this partnership will allow current Intellian customers to utilise existing Intellian NX series terminals by incorporating an option to upgrade them to operate on OneWeb’s LEO constellation in the future.
Michele Franci, Chief of Delivery and Operations, OneWeb, commented: “We are delighted to recommence our production agreement with Intellian. Together we will fulfil the needs of our customers, who are looking for an improved global service with high-speed, low latency and a terminal that will deliver all this with simple installation. OneWeb addresses a range of different markets, which carry their own specific service and user terminal requirements. Our partnership with Intellian allows us to develop a family of user terminals that will meet these varied market and customer needs.”
With multiple product variants designed and extensive testing complete, Intellian is well placed to rapidly deliver a comprehensive range of terminals for the OneWeb constellation. Eric Sung, President and CEO, Intellian, said: “We are excited to deploy Intellian’s industry leading LEO technology into this user terminal development to enable customers to harness OneWeb’s fascinating network capabilities. Testing has shown excellent results and we are fast approaching this technology becoming a reality for users across many market sectors. The OneWeb constellation is a significant development for the industry and for potential users, and is perfectly aligned with our stated commitment of empowering connectivity: through our partnership, our terminals will bring customers high-bandwidth, low-latency data on an unprecedented global scale.”
OneWeb is rapidly moving forward with building its network, and will launch 36 satellites from the Vostochny spaceport in Siberia in December this year, joining the 74 already in orbit. Initially planned at 648 satellites operating on the Ku-band, the OneWeb constellation has the potential and priority bandwidth allocation to expand many times beyond that size.
