Amazon’s Project Kuiper is promising to low-cost connectivity at rates from 100 Mbps for consumers to up to 1 Gbps for enterprise, government, and telecom applications when its constellation of LEO satellites enter service.
Project Kuiper’s ground infrastructure will include gateway antennas that securely send and receive customer data to and from satellites, along with telemetry, tracking, and control (TT&C) antennas. A global network will connect those gateway antennas to the internet, public cloud, or private networks.
Some highlights detailed in an Amazon blog:
- Project Kuiper’s initial satellite constellation design includes 3,236 satellites at an orbit between 590 and 630 kilometers.
- More than 1,000 engineers, programmers, and support personnel are currently working on Project Kuiper
- Development work on Project Kuiper is currently be carried out at a facility in Redmond, Washington.
- In 2023, Project Kuiper will open a dedicated satellite production facility in Kirkland, Washington with the capacity to build up to four satellites per day.
- Amazon has announced contracts for up to 92 heavy-lift rocket launches,
- The smallest terminal will measure 7″ and each side and be capable of 100 Mbps downlinks. The expected cost is under $500.
- Amazon built its own baseband chip, coded name Prometheus, to power all of its customer terminals. The Prometheus chip combines the processing power of a 5G smartphone modem chip, the capability of a cellular base station to handle traffic from thousands of customers at once, and the ability of a microwave backhaul antenna to support powerful point-to-point connections.
- The Prometheus chips will also be used in Project Kuiper’s satellites and ground gateway antennas. Each satellite will be able to process up to 1 terabit per second (Tbps) of traffic on board.
- The first two prototype Kuiper satellites are expected to launch on the first flight of United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket.
Source: Amazon
