(Reuters) – French satellite service provider Eutelsat has successfully carried out the world’s first trial of 5G Non-Terrestrial Network connection using OneWeb’s low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, it said on Monday, sending its shares 9% higher.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
European telecom and space firms are ramping up efforts to expand internet networks with satellite investments at the core of the European Commission’s 10.6 billion euro ($11.1 billion) IRIS² programme.
5G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN), which improve and provide wireless coverage to remote locations directly from space, are one of the projects developed as part of the IRIS² constellation.
IRIS² will feature 270 LEOs and 18 medium Earth orbit satellites (MEO). The constellation is scheduled to be fully operational in 2030.
MARKET REACTION
Eutelsat’s shares, which rose as much as 10.5% earlier in the session, were on track for their largest single-day rise in over three years as of 1036 GMT.
Shares of the Paris-listed company have dropped around 66% in the past year, leading to its exclusion from France’s SBF 120 index of Paris’ most traded stocks in 2024.
WHAT’S NEXT
OneWeb’s satellites were built by Airbus and used chipsets from Taiwan’s MediaTek and equipment from Sharp and Rohde & Schwarz to conduct the trial, Eutelsat said.
The deployment of 5G NTN is expected to lower the cost of internet access and expand satellite broadband for 5G devices, it added.
CONTEXT
Eutelsat is one of the main satellite operators selected by the European Union for the IRIS² programme.
The Franco-British group is piling up losses from its traditional geostationary (GEO) constellation travelling further from Earth, as cheaper and smaller LEO fleets like the one owned by Starlink surge in popularity.
($1 = 0.9550 euros)
(Reporting by Gianluca Lo Nostro in Gdansk; Editing by Milla Nissi)
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