Amazon is making a move that could put company co-founder Jeff Bezos right up against Elon Musk in the competitive world of satellite internet. Specifically, Amazon has applied for a license in Kenya, one of Africa’s most dynamic markets and hotbeds for technology – with the goal of offering satellite internet services to Kenyan consumers.
Licensce Application Ins and Outs
The application – filed by Amazon Kuiper Kenya Limited – showed up in a Kenya Gazette announcement back on June 5 courtesy of the Communications Authority of Kenya. Amazon is gunning for an international gateway operator license which would allow it to build and run a physical ground station in Kenya – the place where satellitte signals come down to earth before getting turned into internet traffic that can then be spread out to consumers via high speed fibre.
Having its own ground station in Kenya would be a pretty big deal for Amazon – marking a significant milestone in the expansion of the company’s African tech presence.
Ground Stations – The Why Behind The Tech
A ground station is the place where satelllite signals land before being converted into good old internet traffic – at which point that traffic gets distributed via fibre networks to the end user. And the closer the ground station to the people who are using the internet the faster their connection will be.
When Starlink set up it’s own ground station in Nairobi earlier this year it promptly cut latency nearly in half – down from an astronomical 296 milliseconds to a much more respectable 39 milliseconds. With this snappy new speed came better quality video calls and faster web browsing for its customers.
Amazon looks to be following a similar game plan here – the realisation that if you don’t have a local ground station your signals have got to travel all the way to another country and back before they can get to the user – only serving to add to latency and slow things down.
Amazon Leo vs Starlink – The Tech Face-Off
Amazon Leo – satellite internet from Amazon – is a service that’s being pitched directly against Starlink’s offering. And the hope is that with this new satellite service Amazon can outdo Starlink in terms of speed.
According to Amazon, the new service will be able to deliver download speeds of up to 400 megabits per second – considerably faster than Starlink’s 150 megabits per second. And for businesses the offering is promising speeds of up to 1280 megabits per second whilst Starlink maxes out at 400 megabits per second.
Amazon is also banking on a ‘direct to device’ feature that allows data to stream between satellites and normal smartphones – all without the need for a cell tower – not dissimilar to the technology Starlink is already using.
Amazon’s Kenya Market Play
Kenya has been carefully chosen as the gateway market for Amazon’s satellite internet service. And one of the reasons for that is because Starlink has already demonstrated that Kenyans – even those in rural areas – are keen to pay for reliable satellite broadband. And to boot, Kenya has a relatively well developed tech scene – which means there’s a decent amount of demand for reliable internet outside of major cities but infrastructure has struggled to keep up.
As a result of all this, Amazon has been trying to get a Network Facilities Provider license – the first step in deploying comms infrastructure in Kenya. And if all goes as planned a Nairobi ground station will enable Amazon to serve not just Kenya but its neighboring countries from a single hub.
Amazon’s Kenya Partnerships
Amazon is also working with Vodafone – parent company of Safaricom – to get its satellite internet connected up with 4G and 5G infrastructure for use in rural areas. Not dissimilar to what SpaceX has already done with the likes of Vodacom and Airtel Africa.