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TAMPA, Fla. — Eutelsat has teamed up with French satellite connectivity startup Skynopy to explore offering Earth observation operators spare capacity on the ground stations used for OneWeb, its low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband service.
The partnership will test reusing some of the 600 Ka-band antennas across 42 OneWeb sites worldwide, Skynopy announced Sept. 11, a move that would represent a major expansion from the startup’s current network of 30 S- and X-band antennas across 15 sites.
“Any LEO ground station network has, by nature, idle time on its ground stations,” Skynopy co-founder and CEO Pierre Bertrand said via email.
“Skynopy will define and test with Eutelsat how to take benefit from this spare capacity.”
Bertrand has previously said a broadband constellation such as OneWeb or SpaceX’s Starlink might have as many as five ground stations going spare at a site housing 20 of them for redundancy.
Today’s Earth observation networks rely on fewer than 30 active X-band ground sites worldwide, he said, typically achieving latencies of no less than 30 minutes.
By contrast, LEO Earth observation satellites will almost always be in view of at least one Skynopy ground station, enabling near real-time connectivity. Ka-band downlinks can also be up to five times faster than current X-band networks, reaching 10 gigabits per second per pass.
“Skynopy, by using the spare capacity of Oneweb sites — antenna time, site space and high-speed backhaul, is commercialising a unique service, maximizing both metrics that Earth Observation satellite operators care for: data freshness and data rate,” Bertrand said.
Skynopy plans to use its software to retrofit some of the OneWeb antennas to make them compatible with Earth observation applications, while also adding its own antennas at OneWeb sites in the S, X, and Ka-bands.
This hybrid approach, similar to Skynopy’s arrangement with French smallsat operator Kinéis and other partners, is intended to support Earth observation operators still using X-band while enabling a future transition to higher-bandwidth Ka-band services.
The startup said the transition is being driven by the rapid evolution of onboard payload technologies that increasingly generate massive volumes of data, from hyperspectral and radar imagery to video. At the same time, critical use cases such as defense and disaster response demand fresh, near-instant access to data.
A first phase of experimentation is slated to begin in the coming months with a one-year beta testing program for selected satellite operators interested in Ka-band capabilities, ahead of a full-scale rollout targeted within five years.
The project, called Akar, is supported by French government funding and billed as the first Ka-band ground station network designed to deliver real-time, high-speed connectivity for the Earth observation market.
The deal comes after Eutelsat announced plans to carve out its ground infrastructure and sell most of it to private equity firm EQT Partners to roll out a ground-station-as-a-service business.
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