Chasing Starlink, China Unicom one step closer to satellite communication services
New licence is expected to foster a moderately competitive market while making internet services more accessible to everyday users
China has issued a satellite mobile communication business licence to a telecoms giant, in a concrete move that accelerates preparations for the large-scale commercial roll-out of its home-grown satellite services.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced on Monday that it had issued the licence to China Unicom, permitting the state-owned company to conduct services such as direct-to-phone satellite connectivity and expand its applications in emergency and maritime communications.
The move is expected to foster a moderately competitive market while making internet services more accessible to everyday users, the ministry said.
“Concurrently, coordination between telecoms enterprises and entities across the satellite mobile communications industry chain will tighten, which will be beneficial for driving industrial transformation and upgrading, as well as enhancing the resilience and security of supply chains,” it added.
This marks the first licence the ministry has issued since it released a guideline late last month urging telecoms operators to leverage low-orbit satellite internet to expand high-speed data services beyond voice and text messaging.
The announcement also comes on the heels of China Unicom’s launch of four low-orbit satellites near Shandong province’s Rizhao city in late August.
The launch included China’s first low-orbit satellite equipped with advanced narrowband Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, which provide low-power connectivity to IoT devices, marking a step forward in the country’s development of low-orbit satellites.
While China has a mature high-orbit satellite network for traditional services such as navigation, telecommunications and weather monitoring, its push to develop high-speed satellite-internet infrastructure remains in its infancy, with low-orbit constellations still in the early stages of development.
China Telecom, which was granted a licence for satellite mobile communications in 2019, has commercialised direct-to-phone satellite connectivity through the high-orbit Tiantong satellite system.
The service has attracted more than 2.4 million users, the company’s deputy general manager, Luan Xiaowei, said at a conference in April.
The telecoms operator was also testing low-orbit satellites to verify its technical capabilities for future services, Luan said.
Beijing has designated satellite communications a key emerging sector, as the country steps up its efforts to create its own versions of SpaceX’s low-orbit satellite-internet constellation, Starlink.
Although two state-led Chinese satellite-internet projects – Spacesail, also known as Qianfan, and Guowang – have launched their first batches of low-orbit satellites over the past year, they are expected to have a long way to go to catch up with Starlink.
It will take another two to three years before domestic services are comparable to Starlink, an industry insider told local media outlet IT Times in late August.