You are surely familiar with the name Starlink. Elon Musk’s project, the person behind Tesla and SpaceX who, based on “place” satellites in space, wants to bring the Internet to almost any point and corner of the planet, including rural areas with less coverage. And now it seems that it has competition.
A rival that comes hand in hand with Amazon and with a name, Project Kuiper. A project that again bets on a “satellite Internet” that will use 3,226 Project Kuiper satellites, which will begin to be launched at the end of this year, to achieve a truly universal Internet.
antennas and satellites
As our colleagues say, in order to achieve this objective, it will be necessary to have all the satellites in orbit by 2026 and Amazon has set out to put three to five satellites into space every day to achieve this. But leaving the satellites aside, what will the rest of the equipment be like?
And that’s what Amazon has taught, that has shown the antennas that users can use who subscribe to their service to be able to have Internet at any point.
There will be three different models. From one, the most basic, with the size of a Kindle, followed by a larger one that would be the intermediate one in the upper part, the top one that will offer better features and greater speed.
On this paragraph you have a photo with the three variants. The first, the one that will offer speeds of 100Mbps, is designed for residential customers and those looking for IoT connectivity. For its part, the intermediate one, the one that rests on a tripod, will offer a speed of about 400Mbps, weighs about two kilos and is designed to be placed on the roofs of apartments and homes to provide cover. The most powerful model has the shape of a low and rectangular table, with measurements of about 76 centimeters by 48 centimeters. It will offer speeds of up to 1Gbps and is designed for the field of institutions and companies.
All these antennas They use an own chip designed by Amazon inside that responds to the name of Prometheus (the same that the satellites will use). A silicon that, according to the company, “can act as a base station managing the traffic of thousands of users and the link back haul microwaves to maintain point-to-point links”. A system in which each of these satellites will be capable of managing up to 1 Tbps of speed.
And it is that Starlink won’t be alone. On another scale, we have already seen how everything indicates that the arrival of the network at all points points to the use of satellites, with projects even in Spain.
Via | Broadband
More information | Amazon
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