Apparently, Mittal went to Downing Street to talk about the future of the failed satellite company but not expecting to meet anybody above a couple of young researchers. He found himself meeting Johnson in the garden of No 10 being persuaded to join the government in committing $1 billion to save OneWeb.
The source close to the deal told Sky: "The meeting was an approach by Boris Johnson who said we're up for this, what about you would you come in as a (co-investor)."
The source claimed "And Sunil said I'll come in if you're committed. 'Is the British government committed or not?' It was a one-to-one between the two men, and Boris said 'we're committed' and Sunil said 'well we are too'."
Two days later, the deal was done, Mittal is the founder of Bharti Enterprises and the tycoon behind Airtel. This was against all the advice from the civil service by the way.
I half suspect neither of them had the foggiest idea what they were doing. Mittall probably thought Johnson did and vice-versa. Anyway, as I explained last year it looks like a bet which has far more prospect of failure than success. I wrote at the time:
You can see that OneWeb is the slowest of all at 1.56 Tbps, needs ten times as many satellites and twice as many ground stations as Telesat. And SpaceX is way out in front with a capacity nearly six times as much of both the others combined.
But OneWeb are a long way behind. SpaceX already have working terminals while OneWeb isn't expected to have their satellites in place before June and expect to start testing by the end of 2021. Sky say OneWeb has 110 satellites in the sky and "will have 146 after Thursday, with seven of the eight ground stations around the world "in varying states.
The original plan was for 720 satellites and 71 ground stations and it's not clear if the reduced numbers are some new plan or are intended to just cover the UK initially.
Marek Ziebart, professor of Space Geodesy at UCL, has told Sky News: "They're not the only people doing it, they have a direct competitor in Elon Musk's company SpaceX.
"And if we think of this as a race to get the service in orbit, developing and delivering such technology, SpaceX are winning that race, SpaceX has a thousand satellites in orbit, OneWeb have 100 - SpaceX have working internet terminals, from which you can get broadband connectivity to their satellites, working now, OneWeb aren't there yet."
"On Friday, advisers at the Department for Digital Culture Media and Sport were briefing that SpaceX could play a part in the Project Gigabit broadband rollout, alongside OneWeb which the government part owns.
"It may be they have to use the competition."
Project Gigabit is a £5 billion government programme to provide high-speed internet to "more than one million hard to reach homes and businesses" but will use its own competitor! The government website says:
Up to 510,000 homes and businesses in Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Dorset, Durham, Essex, Northumberland, South Tyneside and Tees Valley will be the first to benefit as part of ‘Project Gigabit’.
Their available speeds will rocket to more than 1,000 megabits or one gigabit per second. It means families no longer having to battle over bandwidth and will give people in rural areas the freedom to live and work more flexibly. Contracts for these first areas will go to tender in the spring with spades in the ground in the first half of 2022.
In June the government expects to announce the next procurements to connect up to 640,000 premises in Norfolk, Shropshire, Suffolk, Worcestershire, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.
What's the betting that if OneWeb's system does get operational, the UK government is more or less forced to promote it. It is slower than SpaceX (1.56Gb per second compared to 23.7Gb per second) and probably more expensive. Will businesses be happy about that? Will Elon Musk go for a bit of predatory pricing to see off OneWeb?
I would not bet on it surviving very long and a Labour government will use it as a political lever to show what a stupid decision it was, pushed by The Treasury to 'save' money.
When historians look back on Johnsons tenure of No 10 they will surely see the most reckless, profligate, stupid and corrupt government in British history. Our descendants will be paying for it for decades.
