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Amazon’s Project Kuiper: Using LEOs to eliminate the digital divide

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky is enthusiastic about a new connectivity project called Project Kuiper. He talked about it during a keynote speech at ASW re:Invent 2023.

It is called Project Kuiper and last week at AWS re:Invent 2023, it was hailed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) chief executive officer (CEO) Adam Selipsky as a technology breakthrough that  will “provide coverage in places that have had never had coverage before.”

Selipsky made the statement during the conclusion of a more than two-hour long opening day keynote address in which he delved into a litany of announcements revolving around generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), cloud, and hardware advances the company is focusing on.

Project Kuiper is Amazon’s new low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband network that Selipsky said will soon be able to service two distinct groups –  those individuals in locations that have virtually no reliable internet connections, thus helping to close the “digital divide,” as well as private organizations and government agencies.

“Now, the possibilities for consumers is enormous, but so too are the benefits to businesses and governments,” he said. “And there are all sorts of use cases like renewable energy providers who want to analyze data in real time from offshore wind farms. Or first responders who need fast, reliable connections during natural disasters, or organizations that are looking for connectivity backup in case of an unplanned outage.

“Kuiper is going to help to make all of this possible. And AWS customers are already planning for the opportunities that this opens up to connect to their facilities, their sensors, their data, their networks.”

For those customers who prefer or demand that their data not be transmitted over the public internet, at re:Invent AWS announced an enterprise-ready private connectivity service that will allow enterprise and public sector organizations to “move data privately from a remote location directly into AWS, without ever touching the public internet.”

A blog released on the day of his keynote stated that there are “three main pieces of the Kuiper system that move data throughout the network: ground infrastructure, satellites and customer terminals. The ground infrastructure includes gateway antennas that securely send and receive data to and from satellites.”

At re:Invent, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), NTT DOCOMO, Inc., NTT  Communications Corporation (NTT Com), and SKY Perfect JSAT Corp. announced that they have formed a strategic collaboration with Amazon around Project Kuiper. The companies said they expect to use its satellite connectivity services to enhance communications availability and resiliency for Japanese customers.

There was an abundance of other announcements made last week and they included:

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