Sept 7 : Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Vodafone Group and Telefonica are in early talks to create a consortium to bid on European Union satellite spectrum and offer direct-to-mobile services, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The group would jointly bid for a share of 2 gigahertz airwaves that the EU has proposed reserving for a local operator, a plan aimed at increasing sovereign satellite capabilities, the report added.<\/p>\n
No final decisions on the consortium or plans to bid have been made, Bloomberg said.<\/p>\n
Vodafone, Orange, and Telefonica declined to comment, while Deutsche Telekom did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
In May, the European Union announced plans to allocate the bulk of valuable satellite spectrum for mobile phone service to European companies while reducing the share that U.S. operators can acquire, in a push to promote domestic businesses and reduce reliance on Big Tech.<\/p>\n
The European Commission designated two-thirds of the spectrum on the bloc’s IRIS\u00b2 multi-orbit array of 290 satellites for commercial use, divided equally between EU and non-EU operators.<\/p>\n
The consortium would bid on the EU operator portion.<\/p>\n
IRIS\u00b2 is Europe’s response to Starlink, and is led by the European Commission and a consortium made up of SES SA, Eutelsat and HispaSat. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sept 7 : Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Vodafone Group and Telefonica are in early talks to create a consortium…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":617958,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-617957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617957\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/617958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}