In a bid to provide Internet to the “unserved and underserved communities around the world”, Amazon is working to launch a constellation of 3,236 satellites into low-Earth orbit.
The project “Kuiper” will consist of 784satellites at an altitude of 367 miles from the earth, 1,296 satellites at 379miles and 1,156 satellites at 391 miles — facilitating Internet availabilityto over 95 per cent of the earth’s total population.
“Project ‘Kuiper’ will provide low-latency, high-speedbroadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around theworld,” The Verge quoted an Amazon spokesperson as saying on Friday.
“This is a long-term project that envisions servingtens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband Internet.”
Moving forward with the initiative, the project has alreadyfiled with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) — the internationalorganisation in charge of coordinating satellite orbits.
Even though Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos hashis own spaceflight company called “Blue Origin”, the company isconsidering all other options as well.
Details on whether the company intends to build its ownsatellites or buy them from a third party remain unclear as of now.
“There’s no time-frame for when Amazon’s satellitesmight be sent into orbit, but it will need to receive the FederalCommunications Commission’s (FCC) approval before it can do so,” thereport added.
Apart from Amazon, other tech majors have also lately beenworking with satellites.
Elon Musk-owned SpaceX has plans to launch as many as 12,000 satellites as part of its “Starlink” constellation and London-based global communications company “OneWeb” wants to launch 650 satellites to implement new space-based Internet communication systems. Social networking giant Facebook is also developing an Internet satellite of its own, the report noted.