By Gianluca Lo Nostro and Maria Rugamer<\/p>\n
PARIS, Feb 13 (Reuters) – Eutelsat said on Friday that Europe’s planned IRIS2 satellite network must meet customer \u200cexpectations in terms of pricing and performance to attract buyers, following \u200cremarks from major telecoms companies about the project’s commercial appeal.<\/p>\n
Eutelsat CEO Jean\u2011Fran\u00e7ois Fallacher told reporters that \u200bcomments made by Orange and Deutsche Telekom reflected what he was hearing across the market.<\/p>\n
“In my opinion, customers are expecting competitive services and competitive prices,” he said.<\/p>\n
Executives from Orange and Telekom, subcontractors in the consortium building IRIS2, said at an industry event \u200cin January that the \u2060European Union programme would have to deliver performances close to Elon Musk’s Starlink and Amazon’s LEO.<\/p>\n
Both operators told Reuters they fully \u2060support the IRIS2 constellation, which is expected to start operating around 2029.<\/p>\n
Orange said a European system must be competitive with Starlink and Amazon’s planned low Earth orbit network, \u200band that \u200bEurope should avoid fragmentation by aligning efforts \u200bbehind a single solution.<\/p>\n
Telekom said \u200ccustomers would ultimately choose based on performance, security and cost, and that IRIS2 was being developed to meet those expectations.<\/p>\n
Fallacher said the IRIS2 project, which has a budget of about 10.6 billion euros ($12.6 billion), was being designed to deliver competitive services. He described the cost as significant but appropriate for a system of \u200cthat scale.<\/p>\n
Eutelsat plans to launch its next-generation OneWeb \u200bsatellites along with IRIS2 after 2030, Fallacher added.<\/p>\n
OneWeb’s \u200bsecond\u2011generation satellites are meant to \u200bbe far more advanced than the current network, set to \u200cbe replenished with slightly updated versions.<\/p>\n
But despite \u200ban early lead \u200bin serving polar regions, the first\u2011generation fleet of 600 currently in service is based on technology designed a decade ago.<\/p>\n
U.S. rivals Starlink – whose network \u200balready reaches 9,000 satellites – and \u200cAmazon are moving ahead with plans to deploy thousands of newer \u200bsatellites.<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.8430 euros)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Gianluca Lo Nostro in Paris and Maria \u200bRugamer in Gdansk; Editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Gianluca Lo Nostro and Maria Rugamer PARIS, Feb 13 (Reuters) – Eutelsat said on Friday that Europe’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":466534,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[217075,217074,120745,1076,24340,114757,79,193,5408],"class_list":["post-466533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-competitive-services","tag-customer-expectations","tag-deutsche-telekom","tag-europe","tag-eutelsat","tag-iris","tag-science","tag-space","tag-starlink"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}