Amazon plans to use its emerging satellite service, Project Kuiper, to securely route data for its enterprise customers, and expects its new service to complement private cellular networks.
The cloud and e-commerce giant has launched two prototype Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites this year, KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2. On December 14, Amazon announced continuous successful testing of 100 Gbps optical links over a distance of nearly 1,000 kilometers between these two satellites.
“These are laser links between Kuiper satellites that will create a network mesh in the sky,” said Prafulla Masalkar, director at Project Kuiper, in a video release. “It will enable us to reach customers in the far corners of the world and provide them high-speed connections with minimal latency.”
Amazon CEO Adam Selipsky highlighted Kuiper near the end of his keynote address at the company’s annual Re:Invent conference, comparing the service to other “big bets” Amazon has made, including AWS Cloud and Amazon Prime.
“Kuiper’s building a constellation of thousands of Low Earth Orbit satellites,” he said. “Project Kuiper’s going to help close that digital divide by delivering fast, affordable broadband to a wide variety of customers operating in places without reliable internet connections. … the possibilities for consumers are for sure enormous, but so are the benefits for businesses and governments. … in addition to public connectivity, Kuiper is also going to provide enterprise-ready private connectivity services.”
Amazon already offers private connectivity services, but Kuiper is extending this to remote locations where IoT devices may be collecting data that enterprises don’t want to transmit over the public internet.
“Our whole goal at the end of the day is to provide customers with more choice for how they capture data, how they store that data, and how they securely move that data where they need to process it,” explained Naveen Kachroo, Kuiper’s head of product management and business development. “We take your data where you would like us to take it – back to AWS or to your own private network,” he said.
AWS announced a 5G private network offering two years ago, noting that its Amazon warehouses and fulfillment centers could use outdoor small cells to support connected equipment such as tractor-trailers. The company planned to make its private 5G service available to other customers as well, following the AWS Cloud model in which technology developed to support internal operations scaled to become a profit center for the company.
Kachroo noted that private network users will not need to use the AWS Private 5G solution in order to leverage Kuiper’s connectivity. In fact, they don’t even need to use private cellular at all. “They can use Wi-Fi, LoraWAN, cellular – we are agnostic; we are at the WAN level,” he explained. He said customers are provided a terminal that needs line of sight to a Kuiper satellite and includes a port to enable connection to a switch or router.
Telecom companies are one of the most promising verticals for the new Kuiper private connectivity service, Kachroo said. “They want to move their data privately back into the cloud and store it securely,” he explained.
Media companies are another important customer segment, Kachroo said, because they collect terabytes of data from remote sites, process it in the cloud, and then redistribute it to the edge.
A third target customer set is energy companies that need to connect remote devices. Kachroo said energy companies and other customers that need to cover very large areas are unlikely to rely completely on public networks. “What I have found is that they sort of roll their own at these local remote sites, and they sometimes have to stitch together many different ideas and build mesh networks for OT and for IT needs,” he said. “For them to get that ubiquitous connectivity and redistribute the connectivity they have to run their own sort of local networks.”
Artificial intelligence is another driver for private connectivity, Kachroo said. He explained that some energy companies want to bring their data back to the cloud in order to use it to train large language models. Once the models are trained, they are typically more compact and can be returned to the network edge to perform inference, he explained.
During 2024 Amazon plans to launch several more satellites and start testing the Kuiper connectivity services with enterprises. No contracts for private connectivity services have been announced, but Kachroo said the company is in private talks with several potential customers.
