Can Europe's Homegrown Satellite Company Compete with Elon Musk's Starlink?
14:07 Share

This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

Hey, T&B listeners. Before we get started, a heads up. We're going to be asking you a question at the top of each show for the next few weeks. Our goal here at Tech News Briefing is to keep you updated with the latest headlines and trends on all things tech. Now we want to know more about you, what you like about the show, and what more you'd like to be hearing from us. Our question this week is, what would you like to hear from the tech headlines?

If you're listening on Spotify, look for our poll under the episode description, or you can send us an email to tnb at wsj.com. Now on to the show.

Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Monday, April 14th. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We've all learned to think twice before posting something online. But what about taking a pause before entering information into an AI chatbot? There are some very good reasons why you should. Then, Elon Musk's satellite communications service Starlink has been a reliable telecom tool around the world. But with geopolitical tensions rising, Europe wants to bolster its homegrown competitor.

We start with a reminder that not everything you post online is private. That's true for social media, and it's true for artificial intelligence tools. So before you go entering health information into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini with the hope of getting a more precise nutrition and workout plan, hold your fire.

WSJ personal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen has been making a list of the best practices for using chatbots while protecting your privacy. And she's been sharing those tips in a special series out now called Chatbot Confidential. So, Nicole, we talk a lot about artificial intelligence on this show and the ways that it can make our life easier. We even had one of our tech columnists on a couple weeks ago telling us that we should ditch Google in favor of platforms like ChatGPT.

But you found out that there are times when we actually shouldn't be relying on public-facing AI platforms. Yes. And I should clarify here that by public-facing, we mean the consumer versions of ChatGPT, Cloud, Copilot, Perplexity, etc. These are the chatbots that anyone can access from a web browser. And there are also enterprise versions of this software, special built for companies that have stronger privacy protections, etc.

But again, going back to the consumer chatbots, yes, there are definitely some secrets that you should not tell AI. And that's for a few reasons, the primary one being that we're still in the early days of this technology. And that means that these companies made these products public in order to learn from them the way that we are using them and help develop more advanced models or safeguards that don't exist yet.

And so you need to be discerning about sensitive stuff, particularly your financial info, proprietary corporate information or medical data, because we are in the early days and they are still developing this technology in real time. And let's zoom in on the corporate world, because there are concerns about what you just said, keeping proprietary company specific company secrets.

private. And you spoke to one executive who argued that the solution is not actually taking these tools away from employees, but finding better ways for them to work with those tools. Yes. The temptation to use it at work is very strong because it can save you a lot of time.

The problem there is that companies were losing control of their corporate data to these public facing AI chatbots to these entities that didn't have special privacy protections over the way they treat data that we input into the tool. So

So I talked to Kathy Kay, CIO of the global financial company, Principal Financial Group. And she said one way her company is addressing this is by using an enterprise AI chatbot. We call it page that people can use that provides a lot of protections around

making sure that they're the only ones who are leveraging the data that they have access to, things like that. For those that do go outside, we do track the interactions they're having with the external bots. Nicole, what about our personal life? Does using AI become a little bit less risky in that realm?

you don't have the risk of getting in trouble with your boss and potentially getting fired for drafting a company email. But what you do risk is your personally identifying information becoming a part of this model training set or potentially being sent to

company that has the ability to retain that data for a very long time. What was your biggest takeaway from this series and the experts that you spoke to, Nicole? The biggest takeaway from the series is that you should think twice about putting personally identifying information into a chatbot. And if you

feel like you have to then redact or crop out as much as you can and keep your prompts as general as possible and delete often. That was WSJ personal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen. Her three episode series is out now. Look for chatbot confidential in this feed and we'll also link it in our show notes.

Coming up, geopolitics is fueling a next-gen space race. Europe is hoping its own network of satellites can rival Elon Musk's. We'll tell you how after the break. More rewards, more savings. With American Express Business Gold, earn up to $395 back in annual statement credits on eligible purchases at select shipping, food delivery, and retail subscription merchants, including the $155 Walmart Plus monthly membership credit and $240 flexible business credit.

Enjoy the benefits of membership with the Amex Business Gold Card. Terms apply. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash business dash gold. Amex Business Gold Card, built for business by American Express. When Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, Elon Musk's satellite communications company, Starlink, quickly enabled Ukrainian troops to use its terminals on the battlefield.

But in March, Musk, a key White House fixture, posted on X that he was, quote, sickened by years of slaughter in a battle he bet Ukraine would ultimately lose. He threatened that Ukraine's entire front line would collapse if he turned off Starlink access there. That set off alarm bells for European leaders who realized the risk of relying on a single U.S. company and its unpredictable owner.

WSJ reporter Margarita Stancati explains how the decades-old company called Udalsat has set sights on mounting real competition with Starlink in Europe.

So tell us about Eutelsat. Can it really meaningfully compete with Elon Musk's company, Starlink? So the short answer is no, it cannot compete yet with Starlink. But at the moment, Eutelsat is the only operator that can provide that kind of global coverage using constellation of these satellites that circle at very low orbits. So right now, it's the only competition that Starlink actually has.

But when it comes to capacity, they are worlds apart. But the space race is definitely heating up. So China is launching its own low orbit satellites. Amazon is preparing its Project Kuiper constellation. But right now, UtahSat is the only other operator that has these low Earth orbit satellites. And the reason why these are special is because they're close enough to the surface of the Earth that they allow this kind of

near real-time communication. And that's the kind of communication that you need, for example, in a battlefield, but also to use speedy internet connections. So what would it take to allow EUDLSAT to really compete with Starlink? Terminals are much more expensive than Starlinks are at the moment. Could that cost come down as it puts more satellites into orbit and it ramps up capacity, or how does that work?

So Eutelsat says it can catch up with Starlink. The question is how long it will take for that to happen and who will foot the bill. Eutelsat currently has about 600 satellites orbiting Earth. Starlink has more than 10 times as many satellites. So the capacity is far bigger.

So the starting price for Starlink's user terminals is less than $400. Utilsat, through its subsidiary OneWeb, has terminals that are being sold at $3,200, and that's just the starting price. And they're also much bulkier.

bulkier. Eutelsat is planning to launch more satellites, but it's still a long way away from catching up with SpaceX. But one crucial aspect is that now European countries see Eutelsat as potentially key to national security. And

And so are they investing more in it now or is there a plan to talk about investing more in it now? So the French government and the British government are already shareholders. So the hope is very much that these two countries and other private investors will help Eutelsat have enough funds to build up its constellation and do it fast.

But there are still many issues. I mean, the company was struggling because revenue was falling from its main business, which was big pay-per-view television providers. And it was also struggling to compete with Starlink. And also, the two companies have quite different business models. Starlink sells directly to consumers and UtilSat doesn't.

And there are countries in Europe that work with Starlink to provide services. I wonder how politics plays a role in all of this. Are countries and European leaders more likely to want to work more with Utilsat now over Starlink? No one really thought of Utilsat as a real alternative to Starlink in Ukraine until earlier this year. And geopolitics has everything to do with it.

So we've seen this deterioration in the transatlantic alliance under President Trump, and that has convinced European leaders that they need to take quick action to end their dependence on America for their defense. And one of the first vulnerabilities they're moving to address is this big reliance on America's dominance in space.

And we can literally pinpoint the moments that Utilsat suddenly became the focus of attention and became one of the most important companies in Europe, really.

It's when this relationship, this transatlantic relationship, started deteriorating. So when Vice President J.D. Vance delivered this kind of fiery speech at the Munich Security Conference, that is when Eutelsat's CEO, Eva Bernanke, first started receiving inquiries from European officials asking if Eutelsat was ready to step into Ukraine. And there's a lot of information about Eutelsat.

And there's a little bit of irony in all of this because Eutelsat relies on SpaceX to help it get its own satellites into orbit. Is there a plan to reduce that reliance? Eutelsat, unlike Starlink,

does not have a parent company like SpaceX. So Starlink has this massive competitive advantage over Utilsat. So through SpaceX, Starlink has everything in-house. So from satellites to terminals are all being manufactured in-house. And also, crucially, it has SpaceX launchers, which have the most capacity in the West.

because of this fleet of reusable rockets. UtilSat doesn't manufacture anything. It doesn't have its own rockets. So it will always rely on outside suppliers and on other launchers. And SpaceX is one of the launchers that I use. It's not the only one, but it's certainly one of the main ones.

When we think about the timeline of all of this, we know that the EU as a bloc is a very slow-moving one because you have to have consensus among all of these different leaders with all of these different interests. So when it comes to trying to give Udalsat the resources that it needs to compete in a real way with a company like SpaceX, what does the timeline look like?

So the timeline to get this European network of satellites on different orbits into space is 2031. However, the EU and the French government are pressing Eutelsat to try to get more satellites into space faster. But to do that, the company will need more cash. And that will be challenging since the company has funds.

high debt. Currently, the company needs something like 4 billion euros to renew and expand its satellite fleets, including its commitments to this broader project. That was WSJ reporter Margarita Stincati. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show is produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Emily Martosi. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.