On a launch platform by Florida is a rocket of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) which will transport the first lot of 27 satellites for the New Satellite Internet System “Kuiper” in Amazon. The powerful electronic commerce company expects to provide “High speed and low latency internet virtually anywhere on the planet”
If this promotional phrase is familiar to you, it is because it is. The European company Oneweb and Chinese satellite services THOUSAND SAILS and Guowangwhich are under construction, are already part of a fast -growing satellite broadband market that is dominated by Starlink of Spacexand Kuiper He is the most recent competitor. These services attract more and more interest … and not only of private companies, but also of governments.
The idea on which it is based Kuiper It is simple. For several years, the Internet by satellite has made possible connectivity in remote rural areas and in places such as ships, oil platforms and airplanes.
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Unfortunately, this service was provided through a few huge altitudes, which made slow and faces; Therefore, satellite broadband was just a last resort option.
Kuiper It gives this model a total turn, as it plans to launch more than 3,200 small and cheap satellites in orbits of just 600 km of altitude. Amazon expects that to allow you to offer a service comparable to the land broadband, regardless of how remote it is the location of its customers.
The executive director of AmazonAndy Jassy, in a letter addressed to shareholders in 2023, noted that in the world there are between 400 and 500 million homes that do not have access to the Internet, so providing them could be a “Considerable income opportunity for Amazon“The success of the Starlink service, pioneer in the approach”small and bass”, Suggests that he could be right.
Spacex (owned by Elon Musk) already has contracts with millions of private clients and has signed agreements with airlines, mobile telephone operators and the American satellite agency spy, among others.
Spacex is privately owned, so there are not many concrete figures. But the company of analysts Quilty Space predicts that Starlink will increase from the 4.6 million subscribers last year to 7.6 million at the end of 2025, much more than any other satellite broadband service. These figures could generate revenues of US $ 12.3 billion, compared to US $ 6.6 billion of 2024.
No matter how juicy the market seems, Amazon It starts very lagging with respect to Starlink, which already has more than 7,000 satellites in orbit. One of Spacex’s biggest advantages is that he can launch his satellites with his own rockets, which are, by far, the cheapest in the sector.
Amazon decided to use other operators in general, which is more expensive. In 2022, the company signed the greatest contract in the history of the launch industry. He bought 83 launches to Ula, Arianespace and Blue Origin, a rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. (After a demand from the shareholders in 2023, Amazon also reluctantly bought three releases to Spacex).
Caleb Henry, from Quilty Space, believes that high launch costs could increase the total cost of Kuiper to about US $ 20,000 million.
However, Amazon also has advantages. Spacex is vertically integrated into the sense that it manufactures its own rockets. Amazon is integrated into the other direction, since it operates its own Internet businesses.
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Connecting those who are not connected should give more customers to the Amazon electronic commerce site. Analysts speculate that Amazon could include a Kuiper connection with its Prime subscription service, which offers free delivery of packages and access to television, movies and music. In the United States alone, it has 180 million members.
The company indicated that it plans to integrate Kuiper with Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud computing division. AWS data centers can be locations ready for Kuiper land stations, which should help the company deploy infrastructure quickly.
Kuiper said that he will offer a private connectivity service for AWS customers concerned with security, which the company can use to ensure that the data that passes through Amazon servers never travel on the public internet.
Kuiper perhaps identified an opportunity arising from the concerns of foreign clients with respect to Spacex and the closeness of his boss with the Trump government. In March, the Ontario government canceled a contract of 100 million Canadian dollars (US $ 70 million) with Starlink in retaliation for Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on Canada.
Because the United States’s commitment to its allies has been questioned, Italy has doubts about an expected contract of 1,500 million euros (US $ 1.7 billion) so that Starlink provides safe government communications. The concern is that, under Trump’s mandate, the United States brand in general is fogged. Kuiper bosses will be observing with dismay.
