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Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by skissane on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @06:09PM (#27839058)
They are creating an ISP, but how successful is it going to be? The clear leader in satellite Internet constellations is SpaceX Starlink, and Kuiper compares poorly to what Starlink offers. SpaceX is going to have a bigger constellation. SpaceX already has a bigger constellation – over 1600 satellites in orbit, compared to zero launched yet for Kuiper. SpaceX has a huge advantage in having their own launch vehicles (Falcon 9, with Starship under development). Amazon has to rely on third party launch providers, and it isn't willing to choose SpaceX (SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell has said they are happy to launch competitors' constellations, but obviously Amazon doesn't want to fund its main competitor). For now it has chosen ULA, but ULA costs significantly more than SpaceX, and with Starship the gap is going to become even bigger. Amazon's other major option is Blue Origin – which, although owned by Bezos, is not an Amazon company – but while Blue Origin's launch system New Glenn is competitive on paper with SpaceX's (being in between Falcon 9 and Starship in capability), its maiden launch probably isn't until 2023 at the earliest. I think it is likely that Starship will be launching Starlink satellites before New Glenn is launching Kuiper.
Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by ajklsdhfniuwehf on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @09:07PM (#27840405)
starlink won't scale and everyone knows it.

At most, starlink can replace one tmobile.

amz seem to be buying into everything under the sun and trumpling usage agreements (i.e. "reselling" consumer broadband with people joining via dark-patterns despite it being against their ISP terms of service, via amz sidewalk product)... and that can scale up to O.G. Bell levels of monopoly.

Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by skissane on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @09:22PM (#27840492)
If Starlink won't scale, Kuiper won't scale even moreso. FCC has approved 12,000 satellites for SpaceX, and another 30,000 are going through the approval process. Project Kuiper has only applied for a 3,236 satellite constellation. And SpaceX is way ahead on deployment, and is likely to stay ahead.

Other than Kuiper, Amazon has shown no signs of becoming a serious player in the consumer ISP space. Sidewalk is not a consumer ISP service in its own right, it needs to piggyback on a third-party consumer ISP service. Amazon is nowhere near becoming anything resembling Bell.

Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by shaklee3 on Thursday July 15, 2021 @01:03AM (#27841516)
The number of satellites is an extremely poor metric for capacity. A single GEO satellite has more USA capacity than about 900 LEOs
Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by skissane on Thursday July 15, 2021 @03:46AM (#27842334)
Don't you mean to say coverage, not capacity?

Capacity would be aggregate bandwidth, which is determined by the satellite's communications technology (number of transponders, spectrum allocated, modulation used, etc) rather than directly by which orbit it is in.

Comparing constellation sizes does make sense in determining total capacity (aggregate bandwidth of the constellation) assuming that Starlink and Kuiper use similar capacity satellites. I think that is a reasonable assumption, but we have limited info on what Kuiper are planning. Current Starlink satellites have on average 20 GBps capacity each. I can't find any public info on the planned capacity of Kuiper's satellites. Even if Kuiper has higher bandwidth satellites, they'd need a fourfold advantage in bandwidth to overcome Starlink's fourfold advantage in satellite count. And SpaceX is likely to increase the capacity of Starlink in future iterations, so even if Kuiper did have such a bandwidth advantage, it might not last.

Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by shaklee3 on Thursday July 15, 2021 @09:26AM (#27844376)
Both. I specifically said the USA because that's where they're going to make the most money, and at a given time only about 10% of their satellites are over it.

The satellite capability is one thing, but spectrum is another. SpaceX doesn't have priority on a lot of the spectrum they have, so it might be completely unusable by the time they go live.

Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by skissane on Thursday July 15, 2021 @08:28PM (#27851800)
Is Kuiper's spectrum situation any better than Starlink's? From what I've read, Starlink and OneWeb have priority over Kuiper for the same spectrum (since they were approved first).

I feel like we are arguing two different things. I was saying Kuiper can't beat Starlink. You are arguing Starlink is not going to succeed. I'm more optimistic about its prospects than you are, but even if you are right, it wouldn't change my original point – if both fail, then Kuiper still doesn't beat Starlink.

Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by shaklee3 on Thursday July 15, 2021 @01:01AM (#27841507)
How can you say this? Starlink is in beta and nowhere near the full capacity they need to sustain the business.
Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by skissane on Thursday July 15, 2021 @03:18AM (#27842188)
My main point was they are way ahead of Kuiper, which is obviously true. SpaceX has launched over 1600 satellites, Kuiper has launched zero so far. SpaceX has launched over 700 satellites so far this year. SpaceX has a public beta in multiple countries. Kuiper can't have even a private beta since they haven't launched anything yet.
Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by shaklee3 on Thursday July 15, 2021 @09:23AM (#27844350)
I think you're overestimating what it takes to catch up here. There are no contracts. If one is better than the other, people will cancel their service and switch at the drop of a hat.
Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by skissane on Thursday July 15, 2021 @08:25PM (#27851779)
For Kuiper to catch up they need to solve their launch systems gap with Starlink. I think you're underestimating how hard it is going to be for them to close that gap.
Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by shaklee3 on Thursday July 15, 2021 @08:36PM (#27851845)
Blue origin has been at it for a while. While kuiper is new, blue origin is not.
Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by skissane on Thursday July 15, 2021 @09:12PM (#27852051)
Kuiper and Blue Origin are independent companies. Amazon owns Kuiper. Amazon does not own Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos owns that independently of Amazon. Despite having some ownership in common, they are legally required to operate at arms length.

Blue Origin is two years older than SpaceX, and yet has achieved far less than SpaceX has in the same timeframe despite a two year head start. Over that timeframe, SpaceX has successfully delivered 124 Falcon 9 payloads to orbit. Blue Origin hasn't sent anything to orbit yet, New Glenn is targeted to "late 2022" but most observers think it won't launch until 2023 (or even later).

Blue Origin is the one that needs to prove itself here. SpaceX has a proven capacity to deliver payload to orbit. With Starship, that capacity is going to greatly increase. But even if Starship runs into trouble and gets delayed, they still have a proven capacity with Falcon 9 to rely on while any issues with Starship gets delayed. Blue Origin is working through the issues on New Glenn without any fallback.

Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by shaklee3 on Thursday July 15, 2021 @09:17PM (#27852082)
They operate independently, but both are funded by bezos. They don't need to be owned by the same company. They need to both be good at their respective goals and cheap launches will follow.

But to be clear, none of this matters. The business case to sell a $1000 terminal for under $300 isn't closing. They're subsidized right now, and public perception will be very different once the real sticker shock comes in.

Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by skissane on Thursday July 15, 2021 @09:48PM (#27852240)
> They need to both be good at their respective goals and cheap launches will follow.

Is Blue Origin good at its goals? On New Glenn, which is what matters here (not New Shepard), the jury is still out. By contrast, for Falcon 9, the jury returned a verdict long ago.

> The business case to sell a $1000 terminal for under $300 isn't closing. They're subsidized right now, and public perception will be very different once the real sticker shock comes in.

They say they've been cutting the manufacturing cost from $3000 to $1500 to $1000; you are assuming they aren't going to succeed in cutting it further. Even if they can't get it all the way down to $500 (the current sticker price), if they can get it down to $600 or $700, a $100-$200 price rise for new customers caused by withdrawing the subsidy is unlikely to be a huge issue. (The $300 figure was just an aspirational goal Musk set, nobody is paying that little right now, who knows if anyone ever will.)

Re:Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team by shaklee3 on Thursday July 15, 2021 @09:54PM (#27852276)
None other then Elon musk says they need $20-30B in investments to stay afloat recently. They are nowhere near where it needs to be for the terminal cost. The launches can be free and the business will still sink without more government subsidies.