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Amazon’s Project Kuiper is more than the company’s response to SpaceX
- jpalomaki 6y agoCould Amazon Prime integration be more relevant than AWS integration? More services for consumers against fixed monthly fee.
- cure 6y agoPerhaps. Or even just monthly internet passes, for when you go on vacation to a place without proper broadband. You don't have to go very far outside of cities in the US to end up in a completely underserved area.
- riffraff 6y agoyeah, this could be v2.0 of "kindle comes with global data connectivity".
- apendleton 6y agoThis service will operate in a similar band to Starlink, which requires a pizza-box-sized fixed receiver with a clear view of the sky. And SpaceX was only able to get it even this small due to development of new phased-array antenna technology, which, at least as far as we know, nobody else has replicated (at least at a consumer-accessible price point). All of which is to say: current technology, and physics, probably won't ever allow this to be baked into a Kindle.
- VectorLock 6y agoKindle's connectivity was really pushing the boundaries at the time, this would be on a whole different planet.
- chmullig 6y agoI feel like this massively overstates the advantages of an AWS to satellite link. They aren’t going to put tiny regions in space, so it’s just about data transit. Nobody would suggest AWS should start a cell phone company or fiber ISP just for bundling that with AWS. IP, possibly with a VPN, is a very solved issue for AWS access. It’s how 100% of their customers use AWS now, after all.
- gazelleeatslion 6y agoStill... It would be cool to have a 17,000 mph PoP flying over your head at all times for your Serverless apps / edge workers.. https://mobile.twitter.com/harlandduman/status/1277800518010593281 https://mobile.twitter.com/harlandduman/status/1277800518010...
- xwdv 6y agoCEO of Cloudfare replied to stay tuned. NEW Developments must be coming in this space!
- kemiller 6y agoLEO satellites have potential for very low latency over large distances which could be very valuable for multi-zone customers and Amazon itself. Lasers in a vacuum.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> Lasers in a vacuum Wait, Kuiper is doing lasers?
- glxxyz 6y agoThe idea is for laser crosslinks between satellites. Light travels about 30% slower in fiber than in a vacuum.
- pavon 6y agoBut also low bandwidth/area. Which means that this won't be useful for any significant amount of backhaul, only for last mile service in low density areas. Their groundstations will certainly have good connections to AWS, no doubt, but I don't see a huge market for good connection to AWS from sparse area.s There are some niches, for example oil/gas extraction like the article mentioned, but nothing huge. Maybe Amazon plans on making a play for in-car services providing both the internet connection, and back-end in AWS. But car internet connections have been shifting towards bluetooth as everyone already has phones and service, and it is wasteful to have another service for the car.
- caiobegotti 6y ago"If Kuiper succeeds [...]" That's the biggest if clause you will ever see about this because in order for it to succeed at all BO needs to actually launch something to orbit at least once before we talk about success of a commercial product on top of their rockets. I follow up SpaceX quite closely, I admit, but any news about products that absolutely depend on the launch capability of BO is vaporware at most and most probably a PR stunt so they look relevant. They need to deliver something, anything, it's that simple.
- akreal 6y agoThey don't have to launch on BO, they can use any launch provider.
- caiobegotti 6y agoYou're right, but the article suggests otherwise. Their deadline to put half of the satellites in orbit is 2026 so it's plenty of time for BO to have launch capability but until they put ONE object in orbit it's all vaporware, unless Amazon says right now Kuiper is open to other launch providers, which I have not seen in any news source yet.
- wtallis 6y agoHalf the satellites is still a lot of satellites. BO would need to ramp up to at least monthly launches sometime in the next two years. SpaceX is only doing a little better than that, and they started sending the Falcon 9 to orbit in 2010.
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- bryanlarsen 6y agoNew Glenn is a lot bigger than Falcon, though. It has twice the capacity to LEO by weight and more than twice by volume. So if a Kuiper satellite is the same size as a Starlink one, they should be able to launch 120 per flight. 14 flights to get above 1618. That could be done within a single year, although that's a big ask for a company that hasn't hit orbit yet...
- halfFact 6y agoSpaceX is a private military contractor that gets tax money from citizens. Amazon is a public company that needs to disclose their revenue sources and comes from private/voluntary sources. They aren't even comparable.
- iso1210 6y agoAmazon opened an entire data centre to deal with the governemnt
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- cwhiz 6y ago>They aren't even comparable. It is true. SpaceX has delivered astronauts to and from the space station, whereas Blue Origin has yet to achieve a single orbital flight. They are not comparable at all.
- stetrain 6y agoBlue Origin is competing for military and NASA tax dollars just as much as SpaceX is.
- someperson 6y agoSpaceX makes most of their launches from communication satellites (including the investor funded Starlink). The money from NASA International Space Station re-supply (crew and cargo), GPS and NRO satellites is a fraction of what they earn selling launches to the civilian space industry.
- chromedev 6y agoAnything attached to Bezos is going to be riddled with issues and have questionable ethics.
- aliswe 6y ago"With Amazon, it’s a whole different ballgame," says Zac Manchester, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University. “The thing that makes Amazon different from SpaceX and OneWeb is they have so much other stuff going for them.” If Kuiper succeeds, Amazon can not only offer global satellite broadband access—it can include that access as part of its Amazon Web Services (AWS), which already offers resources for cloud computing, machine learning, data analytics, and more." Does that quote sound fishy or what?
- almost_usual 6y agoIt sounds like marketing for AWS.
- maxdo 6y agomaybe this guy will receive some amazon cloud bonuses for his students :) At least our discussion will support some education projects and also make some amazon Guys more happy :)
- gaukes 6y agoI’ve seen this a lot with professors of industry-focused business schools in universities. I think they’re either getting funding / paid or using the connections to pull strings. These professors usually consult with a lot of government organizations and older companies. If you can make these professors your corporate shill, I guess it’s good marketing.
- aliswe 6y agoDid you see the doc "Bananas" where Dole paid a prof to issue a statement comparing it to the antisemite propaganda of ww2 germany?
- thinkcontext 6y agoThe synergy of using AWS ground stations for customers as well as their own use is an interesting advantage. SpaceX has to spend on ground stations and won't make it up until their service goes online, while Amazon can begin recovering their costs right away. And it just plugs in to all their other AWS services as well. Plus Amazon of course has all the best on the ground network infrastructure already in place, SpaceX will have to develop that. Is there any indication of how many customers they have or how much revenue they get from it?
- mcot2 6y agoSpaceX has a tremendous first mover advantage and a ton more experience in Space. Networking talent and building things on earth is not hard to buy. Starlink is ready to go now and already is in Beta. They have more customers signing up for the beta than they can handle and they can charge practically any price they want for this service since nothing else like it exists.
- thinkcontext 6y agoNot sure what you have written has to do with what I said. I did not address the overall merits of Starlink vs Kuiper just the ground station aspect of the developing services.
- 51Cards 6y agoAdditionally I think replicating AWS is much easier these days than replicating the entire technology stack needed to competatively launch / maintain an entire fleet of satellites. Replicating AWS is a solved problem... throw money at it and you can build data center services. Affordably building and launching satellites at scale is much harder. Seems like SpaceX matching AWS would take much less effort than the reverse.
- paulsutter 6y agoBizarre claim. In what way would Starlink have any less access to AWS? Its... the internet > “If Kuiper succeeds, Amazon can not only offer global satellite broadband access—it can include that access as part of its Amazon Web Services (AWS), which already offers resources for cloud computing, machine learning, data analytics, and more”
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> In what way would Starlink have any less access to AWS? It’s a distribution advantage. To sign up a new customer, Starlink has to...sign up a new customer. Contracts, configuration, payment details, integration. Kuiper, on the other hand, has to get them to click a button on a dashboard.
- almost_usual 6y agoKuiper also needs to figure out how to actually launch to space. I think Starlink can figure out their onboarding customer experience faster than that happens..
- verdverm 6y agoName, email, address. The form is on their site and they had to ask the FCC for 5x base station licenses after they put this up. I doubt they have to figure out much.
- apendleton 6y agoBut in either case you need to acquire and mount a physical doodad to your house (or vehicle or office or whatever), right? Entering a credit card number again seems comparatively inconsequential in either case.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> Entering a credit card number again seems comparatively inconsequential in either case For an individual, probably. For an enterprise, skipping new vendor procurement is a material advantage. I don't think it's a decisive one. But it's an advantage nonetheless.
- pmontra 6y ago> Ka band (26.5 to 40 gigahertz) I confess I didn't research it before asking but how does it withstand the attenuation due to bad weather, rain and storms. OK, at worst it should penetrate about 10 km of clouds and rains and an antenna on the ground could be farther away than that, but the source of the signal is at least 10 times more distant (100 times weaker for the same power?)
- ttul 6y agoThere are definitely advantages to having an always-present network and not relying on terrestrial networks operated by third parties. Many big AWS users are companies with extensive sensor networks. Replacing ancient SCADA networks with high bandwidth space networks that connect to your back end inside AWS is a strong value prop.
- growlist 6y ago“They own all these things the other guys don’t,” says Manchester. “In a lot of ways, Amazon has a grander vision. They’re not trying to be a telco.” Damn SpaceX and their mediocre ambitions like colonising Mars (◔_◔)
- jefft255 6y agoI don’t get this article. How should an ISP benefit from being a cloud provider? He says that they’re going to be able to « move data to and from AWS » or something... 1) that’s a terrible idea it will be slow 2) Starlink should work just as well for that.
- baptou12 6y agoTo some extent Tesla could be Starlink's AWS. Every Tesla user could be a potential starlink customer. Could we even imagine a more efficient data collection?
- apendleton 6y agoThe service isn't expected to work very well in the urban areas where I assume most current Tesla owners live, so I'm not sure this is a particularly natural fit. Also, it requires a bulky receiver.
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- almost_usual 6y agoThis article is irrelevant, put something in space and maybe it’s meaningful.
- maxdo 6y agoI don't get main point of this article, ok, any cloud provider tomorrow will buy access point from star link how it will make it different to AWS + their satellite services ?
- maxdo 6y agoFeels like fanboy of Amazon wrote " yeah " this service + this service will be something sooo great, in practice ... Any satellite service solving last mile access and maybe potentially a bit low delay DC exchange when traffic is not very high. Means some exclusive, expensive service. That can be offered by any other provdier by purchasing similar package from Starlink or any other competitor. In real life, lets be realistic Starlink is something will solve suburb access, also gives them an ability to exercise before Mars/Moon/something_else deployment. The impact on DC will be tiny.
- nickysielicki 6y agoI know this might sound a bit cheap but I think there are national security concerns that are worth mentioning. You simply can’t rely on satellites for domestic backhaul unless you’re prepared for it to go away as soon as a war starts. If a simpleton like me is capable of taking a Yagi into my backyard and talking on AMSAT birds with a 5 watt handheld radio, it’s not entirely unreasonable to believe that someone well funded would be capable of tracking and destroying a cubesat in orbit.
- gecko 6y agoThat's honestly an entirely legitimate point, but no nation, to my knowledge, at this point in time, has the ability to take out thousands of satellites, which is what either this or SpaceX's variant use. Besides which, taking out that many satellites would run a very real, very likely risk of kicking off an actual end to space exploration for a century while we waited for the space dust to settle. I'm not saying "no," but I'm saying "less likely than you think."
- valuearb 6y ago“ If Kuiper succeeds, Amazon can not only offer global satellite broadband access—it can include that access as part of its Amazon Web Services (AWS), which already offers resources for cloud computing, machine learning, data analytics, and more.” No they can’t. A handful of Kuiper subscribers in Los Angeles can saturate all of available bandwidth in LA. These satellite constellations are only going to be useful for subscribers in relatively remote and less dense areas.