The prospects for global broadband connectivity are looking up, quite literally.
This, as Amazon on Tuesday (March 14) revealed a first look of the latest progress in its planned constellation network of 3,236 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites.
Codenamed Project Kuiper, Amazon’s latest push to own every touchpoint in the increasingly hyper-connected consumer journey is designed to blanket the globe and provide low-latency internet coverage to tens of millions of potential customers, including both individual consumers and enterprise businesses. Customers will access the network via an antenna created by Amazon.
“This design will connect residential customers who need an even lower-cost model, as well as government and enterprise customers pursuing applications like ground mobility and internet of things (IoT),” the tech giant said in a statement.
Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon devices, said at a Washington trade conference Tuesday (March 14), where the Project Kuiper satellite hardware was unveiled, that Amazon plans to launch its first satellites in 2024 and will begin beta testing the viability of beaming internet-from-space service to both commercial and individual customers the same year.
The company expects to begin mass-producing its Project Kuiper satellites by the end of 2023 and received approval from the FCC’s International Bureau (Federal Communications Commission) for the project’s “orbital debris mitigation plan” last month (Feb 8).
The approval was needed to satisfy a subsequent condition imposed in 2020, when Amazon first received tentative approval for its LEO satellite plans.
“Our action will allow Kuiper to begin deployment of its constellation in order to bring high-speed broadband connectivity to customers around the world,” the FCC order said.
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An ongoing battle over the future of fully connected commerce
Still, despite the science fiction nature of a satellite network beaming down broadband internet to underserved areas of the world, Amazon is actually playing catchup to some of its competitors in the future-fit connected space.
The Jeff Bezos-founded eCommerce titan is already a few years behind the schedule of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has successfully launched around 4,000 satellites into low-Earth orbit as part of its Starlink broadband mega constellation.
The two companies have been duking it out in FCC proceedings, with Amazon objecting to SpaceX’s satellite plans and SpaceX filing objections to Amazon’s. Most recently, SpaceX argued that the commission should limit Project Kuiper to only 578 satellites, rather than the planned 3,236.
“Amazon has repeatedly failed to provide even basic information in response to SpaceX’s concerns about whether and how Amazon can safely operate the large constellation it proposes to deploy,” SpaceX wrote in a letter to the FCC in January of this year.
The FCC Project Kuiper order from February said in a footnote, “In terms of numbers of satellites, we observe that SpaceX’s proposed second generation Starlink constellation, which has been authorized in part, is almost ten times as large as Kuiper’s planned system.”
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Bridging the digital divide
The fight over low-latency satellite broadband will inform the future of the connected economy, which relies on an invisible layer of technology that lets systems securely communicate and make new connected experiences possible.
Research in PYMNTS’ “12 Months Of The ConnectedEconomy™: 33,000 Consumers On Digital’s Role In Their Everyday Lives” report finds that digital engagement is steadily increasing among consumers, with Americans using digital devices and apps a full 10% more than they were one year ago.
That said, billions of people worldwide remain on the other side of the digital divide, living their daily lives without access to reliable broadband. Poor connectivity hampers access to modern communication capabilities, health services, and other important resources like education, creating compounding economic disadvantages for under-and-unserved populations and communities.
The mission of both Amazon’s Project Kuiper and SpaceX’s Starlink networks is, in part, to help bridge that divide with fast, affordable broadband connectivity.
Still, the admirable mission is not without its side effects. Rocket launches are the only direct source of human-produced pollution above the troposphere, the lowest region of the atmosphere, and have a significantly negative impact on the climate.
With thousands of satellites needing to be launched into LEO in the near future, the future looks both bright and a little sooty.
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