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Comment by chmullig | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this massively overstates the advantages of an AWS to satellite link. They aren’t going to put tiny regions in space, so it’s just about data transit. Nobody would suggest AWS should start a cell phone company or fiber ISP just for bundling that with AWS. IP, possibly with a VPN, is a very solved issue for AWS access. It’s how 100% of their customers use AWS now, after all.

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What they do have though is a large number of data centers all over the world with backbone internet connections. By turning each of them into a ground station they will have an advantage.

SpaceX is going to have to create ground stations all over the world at sites with good view of the sky, get redundant backbone connections to them, and continuously pay for those sites. Good views of the sky rule out downtown locations in major cities due to skyscrapers. Outskirts of cities will likely not have the infrastructure for those redundant connections and will have to be permitted, and installed.

The Amazon data centers are usually already at ideal locations, and are effectively self-sustaining financially already instead of being an additional cost.

I don't think any of Amazon's existing products can provide them an edge, and Starlink has quite the head start in orbit, but Amazon does have a huge head start on the ground.

Still... It would be cool to have a 17,000 mph PoP flying over your head at all times for your Serverless apps / edge workers..

https://mobile.twitter.com/harlandduman/status/1277800518010...

CEO of Cloudfare replied to stay tuned. NEW Developments must be coming in this space!

LEO satellites have potential for very low latency over large distances which could be very valuable for multi-zone customers and Amazon itself. Lasers in a vacuum.

But also low bandwidth/area. Which means that this won't be useful for any significant amount of backhaul, only for last mile service in low density areas. Their groundstations will certainly have good connections to AWS, no doubt, but I don't see a huge market for good connection to AWS from sparse area.s

There are some niches, for example oil/gas extraction like the article mentioned, but nothing huge. Maybe Amazon plans on making a play for in-car services providing both the internet connection, and back-end in AWS. But car internet connections have been shifting towards bluetooth as everyone already has phones and service, and it is wasteful to have another service for the car.

You don't need high bandwidth density for this kind of usage. A single downlink in an area connecting to some datacenter in LEO could be useful for latency sensitive stuff. Then on top of that there's a huge market hasn't been cracked yet which is automated planting of crops. It needs 1-2 cm of accuracy to be useful and the best in the market currently is at 6cm. Plus all kinds of IoT stuff and long-range latency sensitive backhaul( in which case LEO constellations win because the distance is actually smaller due to the low number of trans-oceanic cables and the high number of switches along the way).

I'm sure HFT hedge funds are interested.

> Lasers in a vacuum

Wait, Kuiper is doing lasers?

The idea is for laser crosslinks between satellites. Light travels about 30% slower in fiber than in a vacuum.

Maybe they won't put a tiny region in space, but I could get one of these and do it myself... https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-aws-snowcone-sm...

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