Amazon's Broadband project
 

Over the next five years, three new heavy-lift rockets will put thousands of satellites into low earth orbit as part of Amazon's Project Kuiper.

The project aims to provide broadband connections using a constellation of 3,236 satellites.

Rival Starlink is said to have more than 2,300 satellites in orbit already.

The rockets will be made by Arianespace, Blue Origin - which was founded by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos - and United Launch Alliance.

Amazon says Project Kuiper aims to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband to customers including households, businesses, government agencies, disaster relief operations, mobile operators, and other organisations "working in places without reliable internet connectivity".

Amazon plans 83 launches over the next five years, saying it constitutes "the largest commercial procurement of launch vehicles in history".

The firm plans two "prototype" missions later this year - but using a rocket made by ABL Space Systems, and not the three that will launch the bulk of the satellites.


Like Elon Musk's Starlink, users will connect to the internet via a terminal that communicates with the satellites. Amazon says its experience in shipping and making products like Echo and Kindle will be useful in producing and distributing these.

"Project Kuiper will provide fast, affordable broadband to tens of millions of customers in unserved and underserved communities around the world," said Dave Limp, senior vice-president for Amazon Devices & Services, in a statement announcing the deal.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-61009163

From what I've heard of these types of services so far, the speeds can be decent but the latency (ping) can't get close to wired broadband services. Which basically means streaming will be good (ping doesn't matter because of buffering), browsing will be fine (might feel slightly sluggish on loading new pages) but online gaming etc. will be laggy.

It's a decent solution for VERY remote areas though and a great one for people who are on the move a lot (you can just take it with you). For semi-remote areas like Scottish Islands etc there are often better "short range" over-the-air solutions available IMO (they put a little fish on your roof, broadband is broadcast from a station on the mainland, which is obviously much closer than... Space... )

They'll improve latency further but tbh I'm just not sure there theoretically IS a way to transmit a signal 2500 miles (to a satellite and back, low earth orbit is something like 1200 miles) with low latency.

Expensive for those in Remote Scotland

The local dish one not really, my sister has it, it's something like £50/month but you don't need a land-line so not really all that different to a mediocre fibre connection. They tend to be small businesses/projects though so not everyone is aware of them.

If Amazon or Musky can cobble together a competitively priced satellite solution I'm not saying it won't be useful for many people... Like I said it'll work fine for browsing and Netflix and stuff like that. I don't imagine there are all that many competitive online gamers living in remote cottages :joker:.

There's also another rival to this and Starlink called OneWeb. The UK government owns a share in it, and some of their satellites were due to be launched recently by Russia.

However, OneWeb have signed a new deal to use Elon Musk's SpaceX to launch them, which seems a bit of a conflict of interest but there you go.

I don't think a monopoly/one company wanting to steal customers from the other will be a concern for a while with this... I would imagine that demand will outstrip realistic capacity for a while so there'll be room for everyone.

First SpaceX launch is about to happen.

Starlink has gone to **** I've heard, I think all of this has been over-ambitious for the technology that's currently available,

Did you watch it last night?
It went off perfectly.

We got Starlink when it first came out as we live on a boat but its so good, we just got it for our company building too. What we are finding is, its getting better and better all the time. Internet speed is more than double of what we've ever had before.

:pipe:

Yes, I watched the launch. There is space enthusiasts channel called NASA Spaceflight that I watch from time to time, and they covered it. Looks like it was all a success, yes.

From what I've read though it sounds like demand is outpacing capacity and increased demand per satellite has a bigger impact on speeds than was thought, meaning if it was truly to be "the future of broadband" there would need to be a LOT more satellites (or vastly improved satellite technology) than they previously thought. The user base is still tiny but capacity in the US is already cutting speeds. At some point (until they can get way more satellites up and probably better ones) they'll have to make a choice between constantly decreasing speeds for all customers OR significantly restricting new sign-ups. Obviously if you already have it you should hope for the latter :laugh:.

Thats good TS

Musk's internet had been a godsend to ukraine. For things like natural disasters it will save lives. I think people are viewing it the wrong way