OneWeb, Ltd announced plans to launch a series of satellites in low Earth orbit to bring telephone services and especially broadband Internet worldwide. The first investors investors are Qualcomm, an American semiconductor and telecommunications company, and the Virgin Group with its founder, Sir Richard Branson, personally committed.

OneWeb, founded in 2012 with the name WorldVu, intends to bring telephone services and broadband Internet to people around the world who live in places where they’re not available or are of poor quality. It’s estimated that more than three billion people have no access to the Internet and many others have to make do with low-speed connections, sometimes only analog ones.

OneWeb founder Greg Wyler intends to work with local mobile operators to extend their networks. This should enable them to offer their services in much larger areas, where there are no phones, let alone Internet connections.

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Richard Branson stated that the full constellation should be composed of 2,400 satellites. In the initial phase 648 of them will be launched. The initial investment is around $2 billion. No other details were given about the additional investment required for the construction and launch of the entire constellation.

Virgin Galactic, one of the companies in the group founded by Richard Branson, plans to launch the satellites using the LauncherOne system under development. It doesn’t use a classic rocket lifting off from the ground but a small rocket that is launched from the airplane WhiteKnightTwo, the same one used to launch the spaceplane SpaceShipTwo (photo ©Virgin Galactic / Mark Greenberg). Those are small satellites so this system is cheaper than a series of launches on classic rockets.

OneWeb was in talks with Elon Musk (photo ©Dan Taylor / Heisenberg Media), the founder of SpaceX, for a partnership, but the ideas were different concerning the constellation’s architecture. It’s for this reason that Musk has just announced his own similar project that seems more ambitious considering that he also intends to bring the Internet into space, until Mars to connect future colonies. It’s a project even more expensive since we’re talking about a $10 billion investment.

OneWeb’s satellites are scheduled to start being launched in 2016, for the Elon Musk’s ones the time table is much longer. Musk stated that it will take more than five years to build the satellites so the constellation should start being put into orbit in the next decade. If someone else had announced it there would be a strong skepticism but we’re talking about a man who was considered a fool when he founded SpaceX so we must take him seriously.