Will Amazon become a phone operator? Project Kuiper is ready to take flight and revolutionize the phone market. Here's the news
Amazon is the undisputed giant of online shopping. And this is well known. But now it plans to debut also in the telecommunications market, becoming a worldwide telephone operator. The assumptions are there: according to a British research conducted by the company DecTech, Amazon could win about 25% of the British market, positioning itself ahead of other providers.
The company of Jeff Bezos in fact is about to launch a constellation of three thousand satellites that will rotate around the Earth to provide broadband to almost the entire population. The project takes the name of Kuiper Project, and has been confirmed by Amazon after GeekWire revealed in a leak the existence of a group of satellites ready to take flight into space. The e-commerce giant isn't the only one looking to offer phone services. However, compared to others, the Kuiper project is definitely closer to being actualized.
Why does Amazon want to become a telephone operator?
Thanks to new technologies, today large corporations and IT giants can access the telephone market more easily. In fact, broadband can be delivered from a set of satellites circling the Earth, at a lower orbit than traditional ones. Proximity allows for a stronger, wider signal at a lower cost and lower latencies. For example, Space X plans to launch about 12,000 satellites that will be part of the constellation called Starlink. At the same time, the company OneWeb then wants to launch 650 satellites, and Facebook is also approaching the idea, planning to launch its own group ready to provide network to devices.
Aside these projects, Amazon's is definitely the most advanced and defined. Kuiper Project foresees the existence of a group of satellites positioned at three different latitudes: 784 will be less than 500 kilometers from Earth; 1296 will be at 610 kilometers and finally 1156 satellites will be positioned at a latitude of 630 kilometers. This constellation of devices will rotate around the globe, allowing different areas of the world to have access to the network. The areas covered will start from 56 degrees north, i.e. the central part of Scotland, up to 56 degrees south, i.e. the extreme south of South America. The Kuiper project will therefore be able to offer Internet access to 95% of the Earth's population. Amazon's goal is to allow even communities not served (totally or partially) by the Internet, can have access to high-speed broadband.
Amazon will be a telephone operator: when will the revolution begin?
Naturally this is a long-term project, there are still many details to be defined. In fact, the Company still has to decide whether to produce its own satellites or buy them from third parties. In addition, it has yet to make a decision on the date to launch them into orbit, although Amazon's CEO owns his own space company called Blue Origin. Then again, this is a very ambitious plan, and to make it work, all options must be considered. Last year Amazon presented a similar idea AWS Ground Station, a cloud computing service that will enable communications between Earth and Space. In short, the Kuiper Project exists but it is not yet known when it can be applied, also because before sending the satellites into orbit we need the approval of the Federal Communications Commission.