By Aman Shah
MUMBAI (Reuters) - Internet delivered globally via satellites came a step closer on Thursday after a group of global investors agreed to put $500 million into OneWeb Ltd, one of the largest corporate venture financings so far this year.
OneWeb, whose backers include Richard Branson's Virgin Group and Indian billionaire Sunil Mittal's Bharti Enterprises, said it would use the funds to acquire 65 commercial rockets to launch satellite-borne Internet services to extend the reach of mobile operators to customers in remote corners of the world.
Other investors include Airbus Group
OneWeb, which plans to start services by 2019, must put its proposed network -- initially expected to number 648 low Earth orbit, geosynchronous satellites -- into space before 2020, or risk losing licences awarded by international radio spectrum regulators.
OneWeb, based in Britain's Channel Islands, plans to pay Virgin's spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic, for 39 launches, and has contracts with Europe's Arianespace to provide 21 Soyuz rockets.
Airbus Space and Defence has formed a joint venture with OneWeb to build a high-volume satellite production factory. The Airbus production partnership said earlier this month it planned to produce 900 satellites for the venture.
The goal of the company is to provide affordable broadband Internet services to rural and under-served regions, enabling voice and data communications via user terminals on the ground.
Before starting OneWeb, Greg Wyler co-founded satellite venture O3b Networks and briefly worked at Google Inc
Wyler left Google in 2014 to work on his own satellite project, named WorldVu, which later became OneWeb.
Google, along with Fidelity, invested $1 billion earlier this year in another Internet-via-satellite project being developed by California-based SpaceX, which was founded by Tesla Motors
Using satellites to deliver broadband Internet to hard-to-reach users remains a highly speculative undertaking that has been littered with failed investments and bankrupted ventures.
The OneWeb project relies on radio frequencies abandoned by an earlier satellite project, Teledesic, which flopped after raising $1 billion from high profile investors such as Microsoft
Similarly, two other big satellite ventures of the 1990s, Iridium and Globalstar, ended in bankruptcy.
(Additional reporting by Eric Auchard in Frankfurt; Editing by Anand Basu and Mark Potter)
