Technically, OneWeb is already in commercial service and already making money with beta customers, although probably not much. It has no debt and plenty of fu

Technically, OneWeb is already in commercial service and already making money with beta customers, although probably not much. It has no debt and plenty of funding considering its relatively low burn rate, (from their latest financial report on their website). Putting Kuiper even in the same page, is a stretch. If all goes to plan, Kuiper will have 2 prototype sats up in late 2022. That’s less than 0.1% of the full rollout. So at best Kuiper is looking at 2024-2026. Average client does not care about which telco they use, at most they care about download speeds (which can all be very similar, accounting for having less customers, those sats with lower throughput). Fanciest tech does not mean much in this space, it’s an ISP not a laptop. The 50B revenue currently in the satcom market, is not made up of clients benchmarking very thoroughly. 32ms vs 34ms or a slightly better or worse handover will not determine where all those 50B go. It’s still yet to be proven that the +20B Starlink or 10B Kuiper are costing is gonna be even sustainable on a 5yr basis. Given Starlink’s > ~5% satellite failure rate and its very short lifespan of 5yrs. OneWeb at ~2B total cost (thanks to clearing all debt pre Ch11) and an order of magnitude lower failure rate and double the lifespan does not sound such a bad deal. Besides, there’s plenty of satcom business to be sold, while OneWeb will certainly get a much smaller share of the market, telcos, governments and military can pay for OneWeb’s 2B cost and plenty more in some years time.