Amazon gets into the satellite connectivity game

All the cool kids have low-orbit nanosatellites these days and Amazon is not about to miss out on the latest connectivity fad.

The news comes courtesy of some pro sniffing about from Geek Wire, which spotted a bunch of new filings made with the International Telecommunications Union last month via the FCC by a company called Kuiper Systems. The dogged hack followed his hunch and got in touch with Amazon to see if it was involved and got the following response.

“Project Kuiper is a new initiative to launch a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites that will provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world. This is a long-term project that envisions serving tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet. We look forward to partnering on this initiative with companies that share this common vision.”

It seems to be very early days for this project, but if Amazon’s behind it you can be sure it will be well funded. Furthermore Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has always had a thing for space and has his very own rocket company called Blue Origin. It’s too early to say whether Bezos will get Blue origin to launch the Amazon satellites but you’d presumably get short odds on it.

As we recently found out from talking to nanosatellite startup UbiquitiLink, low-orbit satellites are handy because they don’t suffer from the kind of latency issues regular geostationary ones do. However you need a lot more of them to achieve the same area of coverage, hence the whole nanosatellite thing.

Loads of other companies seem to be thinking this is a promising business to get into, mainly to provide connectivity to remote areas but, if you’ll excuse the pun, the sky’s the limit. It’s not immediately obvious what the return on investment is on lobbing a bunch of satellites into space to help people who live in the middle of nowhere get online, but they’ve presumably given it some thought and reckon the sums add up.