OneWeb close to India approvals
April 27, 2022
By Chris Forrester
OneWeb looks set to shortly receive the crucial landing rights and market access approvals from the Indian government to deploy its global satellite systems for launching broadband from space services in this year later this year.
OneWeb has applied to the Indian National Space Promotion & Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) – a central regulatory body mandated to attract private capital into the space sector – for these statutory clearances, according to a report in India’s Economic Times.
“We have already applied to IN-SPACe for the requisite approvals (read: landing rights and market access) and are confident these will come through soon,” a senior OneWeb executive told the newspaper.
OneWeb – co-owned by India’s Bharti Group and the UK government – recently received the key GMPCS (global mobile personal communications by satellite services) licence from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). OneWeb’s other key shareholders are Eutelsat Communications, Hanwha Systems, SoftBank and Hughes Networks.
After the GMPCS approval, the next stage is winning permissions for satellite landing rights and market access which are critical for OneWeb to establish in-country earth stations (read: satellite gateways) and also deploy its low earth orbit (LEO) global satellite bandwidth capacity in India. OneWeb has sought DoT approval for setting up the gateways.
A few days ago OneWeb contracted with India’s New Space India to launch some of its remaining satellites.