Tag Archives: Quinfan

Filling the Sky with Satellites

The skies are quickly filling with communications satellites. Following is a short list of the many ventures that have or will soon be launching large numbers of broadband satellites.

Starlink now has over 10,000 operational satellites in orbit, with the ultimate announced goal of reaching 42,000 satellites. The company is not sitting still and will be introducing its new V3 satellites sometime this year, that promises to provide 10 times the download and 24 times the upload capacity of the current V2 satellites. That should mean a big boost in the capacity of the Starlink constellation and faster speeds. Starlink is likely to maintain a major advantage over competitors through its use of the reusable Starship rocket.

Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper) currently has around 212 satellites in orbit. The company was recently granted a two-year delay by the FCC of its original commitment to have an operational network by this summer. The company also recently got approval from the FCC to increase the constellation size to 7,700 satellites. The company is working to accelerate satellite launches and launched 32 satellites in February using the Ariane 64 rocket. Amazon Leo has contracted for 18 additional launches with Arianespace.

Eutelsat OneWeb is currently operating a 648 satellite constellation in twelve polar planes that is providing broadband to enterprise, government, and maritime customers. Its key markets today are in places like Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan. The company has ordered over 300 additional generation 2 satellites that should start being deployed later this year.

Blue Origin, a rocket company, plans to launch a constellation of 5,408 TeraWave satellites starting at the end of 2027. The company is promising speeds up to 6 Tbps. The constellation will be comprised of optically connected satellites using both low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO). The satellites will be interconnected using optical lasers. The target market for Blue Origin will be enterprise, data center, and government customers who need a reliable primary or secondary broadband connection. They think their primary market will be in remote, rural, and suburban areas around the world, where the cost of providing diverse fiber paths is too expensive.

Telesat’s Lightspeed satellite business got its start in December 2026 with the launch of its first two satellites. It plans are to launch 157 satellites by the end of 2027, with an ultimate goal of 298. The first 156 satellites will focus on support for NATO and allied nations. After that, the company hopes to be able to provide global coverage for enterprise customers, including the aviation, maritime, energy, and government sectors.

China’s Guowang (the National Network) has launched 164 satellites and has plans to launch 12,992 satellites to compete with Starlink. The company plans to launch 310 satellites in 2026, 900 in 2027, and 3,600 per year starting in 2028. There will be two separate constellations, one at 500 to 600 kilometers and a second around 1,145 km.

Quinfan (also known as Spacesail or G60) is being developed by Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST). The company currently has 108 satellites in polar orbit as part of its first constellation of 648 satellites. The company has announced long-term plans to reach over 15,000 satellites.

Meanwhile, there is another space race happening for companies wanting to provide direct-to-device cellular service. The key players are Lynk Global, Skylo, a partnership between SpaceX and T-Mobile, a partnership between AST SpaceMobile and AT&T/Verizon, and a partnership between Globalstar and Apple.

Future Satellite Competition

I’ve been thinking about the long-term trajectory for satellite broadband in rural areas. I saw a recent estimate that Starlink has around 2.6 million customers in the U.S. and is still growing. I have to think that most of these customers live in places that don’t have a fast broadband alternative to satellite broadband.

I got to thinking about satellite after a recent conversation with an Uber driver. She lives in a small rural town in my county, and she and most of her neighbors use Starlink today. She says that it works adequately well for the way her family uses broadband, but that it’s far too expensive. She expects to be changing to fiber in 2026 when Frontier builds fiber in her area. She said she already knows people nearby who changed to Frontier fiber that was built in 2025. I researched her neighborhood, and Frontier is building fiber with the help of a broadband grant funded by the State of North Carolina.

There has already been a lot of rural fiber built with grant funding. There are fiber construction projects underway from CAF II, RDOF, ReConnect, NTIA Tribal, and EA-CAM. States awarded a huge amount of grants from the Capital Project Funds, from ARPA, and from State general funds. My best estimate is that these various programs will fund the construction of fiber to around 8 million rural fiber passings. My estimates are that there are still 2.2 million passings to be built from these programs in 2026 and another 1.2 million passings in 2027. On top of these programs, it looks like there will be roughly another 2.5 million rural fiber passings coming from the BEAD grants that have been tentatively announced.

I don’t have a good estimate for the coming passings from rural fixed wireless construction, but there is still construction of WISP networks being funded by RDOF and other grant programs. It looks like BEAD has tentatively awarded grants for fixed wireless to a little less than half a million new passings. WISPs are building networks with speed capabilities in the range of 500 Mbps download, which is a lot faster than what is being delivered by Starlink today.

These various grant programs are going to cover a lot of rural America with fast broadband, and that is going to eat into the potential market for Starlink and Amazon LEO. Starlink faces the issue of having a price that is significantly higher than the large majority of ISPs that are building grant-funded networks. That’s something that the company can fix by lowering rates. But even with lower rates, Starlink will not match the speeds of the grant-funded networks, at least with current satellite technology.

We have no real ideas about the pricing and speed capabilities of Amazon LEO. There is a lot of speculation that the company will create interesting bundles for satellite broadband with Amazon video and shopping.

The bottom line of my speculation is that the U.S. households that will be interested in satellite broadband will be shrinking over the next few years as millions of rural homes get faster broadband alternatives from fiber or fixed wireless.

It’s also likely that there will be serious competition between Starlink and Amazon LEO as they each try to lock down a share of the U.S. market. Will the two companies collude to keep prices high, or will they devolve into the kind of fierce competition we see in the cellular industry today?

On a worldwide basis, both U.S. satellite providers are going to see significant competition from the Guowang (the National Network) from China and the Quinfan (Thousand Sails) constellation from Shanghai. My best guess is that these two companies will undercut the prices of the U.S. providers to try to corner the markets in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Starlink has a unique market opportunity today since it brings the only fast broadband option to huge numbers of homes. But in North America and Europe, those opportunities will decrease as faster terrestrial networks are constructed. Starlink’s unique monopoly disappears when Amazon LEO enters the market, and possibly gets really competitive when other worldwide constellations come online.