Veon expects customers using Starlink in Ukraine to more than double this year

By Joan Faus

BARCELONA, March 3 (Reuters) – The number of people in Ukraine connecting to the internet using SpaceX’s Starlink will probably reach around 12 million by the end of ​this year from the current 5 million users, the CEO ‌of telecoms group Veon said on Tuesday.

Last year, Veon signed a partnership with Elon Musk’s company in a bid to bring satellite connectivity to mobile users in remote areas as competition in satellite-to-smartphone connectivity intensifies. Veon unit Kyivstar has ‌rolled ​out the service in war-torn Ukraine.

“I would expect ⁠every Ukrainian to consider ⁠having the ability to connect to satellite,” CEO Kaan Terzioglu told Reuters at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “Due to electricity outages, it could be the case that everybody once in a ​while will need the service.”

Twelve million people represents around half of Kyivstar’s total customers, he added.

Dubai-based Veon also plans to integrate ⁠Starlink’s service into the network of Beeline, ⁠its operator in Kazakhstan.

Terzioglu said he hoped the service ​would be fully operating by the end of March and that ​it could also launch this year in at least one ‌of the three other countries – Pakistan, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan – where it operates.

The group could consider entering “large-population, underserved markets” in South Asia, Latin America and Africa in a three- to five-year period if the right ⁠conditions arise, such as prices and taxation.

The partnership with Starlink is non-exclusive, and Veon has said it is also in talks with Amazon’s Project Kuiper, ⁠AST SpaceMobile and ‌Eutelsat OneWeb.

But Kyivstar CEO Oleksandr Komarov told Reuters ⁠it would not use other satellite providers besides ​Starlink before ‌the end of next year given the time ​it would ⁠take them to be operational.

Komarov also said Kyivstar planned to deliver the first large language model using Google’s Gemma framework in the next quarter and that it would be used for “Ukrainian state purposes”, including war.

(Reporting by Joan Faus; Additional reporting by Leo Marchandon; Editing by David Latona ​and Andrei Khalip)