China’s SpaceSail and Project Kuiper could become a powerful competitor to Elon Musk’s Starlink, which currently dominates the satellite internet segment.
China’s SpaceSail and Project Kuiper could become a powerful competitor to Elon Musk’s Starlink, which currently dominates the satellite internet segment.
According to Reuters, Starlink is facing increasingly tough challenges to its dominance in the high-speed satellite internet market,
Competitors include Chinese competitor SpaceSail, as well as a service funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Shanghai-based SpaceSail signed a deal to enter the Brazilian market in November and said it was in talks with more than 30 countries. Two months later, it began operations in Kazakhstan.
Separately, Brazil is in talks with Bezos' internet service Project Kuiper and the Canadian company Telesat.
Starlink has launched more satellites into low Earth orbit — an altitude of less than 2,000 km — since 2020 than all of its competitors combined.
It is noted that last year China launched a record 263 low-orbit satellites.
Few of Musk’s international competitors have the same ambitions as SpaceSail, which is controlled by the Shanghai municipal government. It has announced plans to deploy 648 low-orbit satellites this year and up to 15,000 by 2030.
Starlink currently has about 7,000 satellites and has set a goal of launching 42,000 satellites by the end of the decade.
Last year, SpaceSail raised 6.7 billion yuan ($930 million) in a funding round led by a state-owned investment fund that is involved in modernizing China’s manufacturing capacity.
As previously reported, the terminals of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system for Ukraine were purchased by Poland, which continues to pay a subscription fee for them. Therefore, according to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digitalization of Poland, Krzysztof Gawkowski, their disconnection would be a violation of the business contract and is unlikely.
As dev.ua wrote, Elon Musk himself denied media reports about the possible shutdown of Starlink if Ukraine does not sign an agreement on minerals.
In turn, Reuters, citing its own sources , reported that American negotiators are putting pressure on Kyiv and raising the issue of the possibility of terminating Ukraine’s access to Elon Musk’s Starlink.
Meanwhile, Defense Minister Rustem Umerov assured that Ukraine has an alternative to the Starlink system in the event of its shutdown.
