(ORDO NEWS) — Amazon plans to deliver the Internet from space using 3,236 small satellites in low Earth orbit. It’s called the Kuiper project.
In April, the company signed a multi-billion dollar deal — the largest rocket deal in commercial space history — to launch Kuiper satellites with three different entities: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance (a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin) and Europe‘s Arianespace.
“In many ways, this is a response and competition to Elon Musk and SpaceX with their Starlink network,” said cosmic Michael Schitz. Amazon first unveiled Project Kuiper in 2019, but the company’s announcement last month gave it a new boost.
SpaceX’s Starlink already has about 2,000 satellites in orbit, serving about 250,000 subscribers. The Federal Communications Commission has approved SpaceX’s launch of a total of 12,000 satellites.
Amazon has yet to launch any satellites, but it could be a big player in this game.
“The satellite communications market is worth several tens of billions of dollars,” said Caleb Henry, senior analyst at Quilty Analytics.
“No one in the industry believes this is one system that will take it all. We expect to see at least two and possibly more constellations catering not only to residential consumers, but to all types of businesses or organizations that depend on an Internet connection.” “.
According to the estimates of the International Telecommunication Union, a UN organization, 37% of the world‘s population has never used the Internet, and 96% of them live in developing countries.
Amazon joins the list of tech giants, along with Yandex and Mail, which have invested in developing digital infrastructure to support their core services.
Amazon is known as the ‘everything company’, and without the Internet, it’s hard to have a company of everything,” said Henry.
“Amazon’s fastest growing segment is its AWS cloud service. In support of this service, they have created a huge amount of Internet infrastructure, whether it be data centers or fiber optics.”
Henry said space is a “very natural extension” of Amazon’s data and consumer business, “providing goods, electronics and resources to people around the world.”
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