“We’ll definitely be beta testing with commercial customers in 2024,” Dave Limp, head of Amazon devices, said at a conference in Washington.

The “standard customer terminal”, 11-inch square antennas for the Kuiper network, will cost Amazon less than $400 each to produce and provide Internet speeds of 400Mbit/s for customers, the company said.

Up until now, Starlink has been unable to obtain a communications license to operate over South Africa, but I'm thinking that Amazon will be able to, mainly because it has quite physical presence on the ground in South Africa.

But I'm also wondering what a satellite service means for spying (I've not forgotten about the US government's NSA and AT&T's collusion on phone spying). Recent rumours also have it the Chinese wanted to spy on undersea Internet cables for the islands around Taiwan. So it is safer to just assume everyone is spying on your communications, and your own government is also not necessarily the "good guy".

See https://techcentral.co.za/amazon-targets-2024-for-launch-of-starlink-rival/

#technology #satellite #Amazon #ProjectKuiper