You can click on the individual satellites in that list, if you click on those launched on 2024-10-15 you can see that many are not their operational orbit and are still around 800-900km, and a few of those of the other groups are also in the same case, at this point these have failed to raise their orbit to operational shells, and most of these are decaying (just slowly given their altitude);
Jonathan McDowell is respected and thorough, he can generally be trusted.
@SegerYu on twitter plotted a graph showing the altitudes of each Qianfan satellites as of last month:
About 17 have failed to reach 1000km and have not raised orbit in monthsIn my opinion the single main reason for the gap in Qianfan launches was the lack of launch opportunity: Since the previous Qianfan launch in march, and with the exception of one expected CZ-8 Qianfan launch in april that was aborted for unknown reason, the various Long March launchers that are capable of launching large Qianfan batches (CZ-5B, 6A, 12, 8/8A...) have regularly launched (or had launch attempts of) governmental or military payloads (Guowang, Shiyan, Yaogan, all likely have higher priority than commercial satellites) at a relatively regular interval, coherent with each model's turnaround and launch campaign duration. Spacesail's issuance of 4 invitation to tender for launch contracts before the end of 2025 or the begining of 2026 also hint at a launch bottleneck (only 1 of these 4 resulted in launch contracts due to a lack of bids).
But issues with the satellites themselves may also be a plausible compounding factor, if as the original SECM article implies, that "Qianfan Constellation Batch 03" is indeed the 3rd Genesat-built Qianfan satellite batch after their two previous one launched on 2024-10-15 & 2025-3-11, then the fact that the 3rd batch is still in production 7 months after the launch of the 2nd clearly shows production issue.
