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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

If you look at their marketing material, you find that they are marketing Kuiper almost exactly the way that SpaceX markets Starlink. Except for specialty markets, and what are literally edge cases, they both face a shrinking TAM due to the expansion of terrestrial wireless.

I also can't find any compelling synergies with AWS, which seems like the obvious place to look for an advantage if you are Amazon.

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> I also can't find any compelling synergies with AWS, which seems like the obvious place to look for an advantage if you are Amazon.

I think it's more like Bezos vs Musk. Musk has a launch capability and then satellite internet; now Bezos is getting a launch capability and so will want satellite internet.

I guess you could have edge servers on satellite in the Canadian north or Siberia or Mongolia. The problem is there aren’t very many consumers out there for such things and those who are don’t mind a extra 50ms probably

Slightly faster DNS is the only thing I can think of

Musk at least has X platform for spreading the uncensored gospel

Emerging markets with next to nill infrastructure and high practical barriers to terrestrial infrastructure due to no roads / legal protection or presence of easements / people will rip fiber right out of the ditch to sell for $0.10 -- I've seen people in developing nations spend their entire month's paycheck on a cell-phone top off.

They might do the same for satellite internet.

That's good in terms of delivering utility to people, perhaps also a geopolitical thing if there is competition from China in developing countries. But it doesn't sound very profitable. The costs are all at US prices (engineers, hardware etc) and selling to the developing world. It's "buy high, sell low".

As far as I know US prices are the lowest ones available to Africans for satellite internet. Is it cheaper to launch in Africa?

If you think it's cheaper to launch rockets and use engineers in Sudan or something you have outsmarted Bezos. He is such a greedy bastard, I have 0 doubt whatsoever that if it were possible and cheaper he would do it instead.

Even though this may seem backwards, it is buy low sell high. They are getting engineering and telecom services far cheaper than they can provide in their own country, and the cost to provide terrestrial in their own (OP's stated alternative) would be phenomenal.

I think you've missed the point here. The question isn't whether the prices can be beaten. The question is whether the prices are low enough that enough people would want to/be able to buy.

Every "beautiful developing country" I've been in has been able to make prices arbitrarily low to the end user while still paying the full telecom prices by use of some sort of sharing like a cafe.

It doesn't matter so much that the nominal price is low, only that it is cheaper to buy bandwith from the satellite provider than their alternatives. If the local populace can't afford it as an individual subscription an internet cafe will buy it, and as the economy develops it slowly disperses into individual subscriptions rather than by the town internet cafe.

If you wait until everyone in developing nation has individual subscriptions you've already lost the game to someone else. Ground zero isn't selling internet to a goat farmer who can't afford it, it's selling one subscription to 100 goat farmers and one to the rich corrupt policeman and then capturing additional subscriptions as their wealth increases as their nation develops.

What about for cars and any other transport like ships, etc? If they have a simple system that makes integration as simple as AWS sdk while being cheaper and faster that would be cool.

Being an ISP, CDN, Cloud Provider and Content Provider gives serious advantages. That's a great way to out competitors and get hefty fines at some point.

> marketing Kuiper

Regarding this, I am dumbfounded why they keep calling it Project Kuiper.

The branding does not sound like something serious.

SpaceFront, the orbital CDN.

So a CDN with... higher latency for people on Earth?

Serving from space CDN means at least 2x better ping than Starlink (for content directly served by CDN). Then you upgrade to space Cloud and provide even more content with fewer hops.

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