Following years of development, Amazon’s satellite internet system, Project Kuiper, has finally shown that its technology works.
The company today released a video demonstrating Project Kuiper’s test satellites in Earth’s orbit beaming internet access to Amazon engineers on the ground.
Through the satellite internet access, the engineers were able to stream from Amazon Prime Video, make a purchase on the e-commerce site, and conduct a video call between two users in Texas and Washington, seemingly with no lag.
“We can confirm a 100% success rate for our Project Kuiper Protoflight mission,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced on Twitter.
The successful test occurs more than a month after Amazon launched a pair of prototype satellites to test Project Kuiper, a satellite internet system that seeks to rival SpaceX’s Starlink. Last week, Amazon said the prototype satellites successfully maneuvered in Earth’s low orbit. Now the company says the satellites can fulfill their main objective: To supply high-speed internet to users on the ground.
In a blog post, Amazon says it was able to download and upload internet data on the Project Kuiper satellites. There’s no word on exact speeds, but the broadband quality was good enough to enable 4K video streaming.
The company only has two test satellites in orbit. As a result, Amazon only had about a “30- to 120-second window” to communicate over the satellites, which are traveling at around 28,000 kilometers per hour. But as Project Kuiper expands, the company plans on operating hundreds and eventually thousands of satellites in Earth’s orbit to ensure robust coverage.
Amazon adds that “every major system and subsystem on board the two prototypes—from flight computers and solar arrays to our propulsion system and advanced radio frequency (RF) communications payload—demonstrated nominal or better performance following launch.”
“Although we’ve already validated the core satellite and network design, we will continue running experiments over the next several months under different conditions and observe how our prototype satellites hold up to the extremes of space,” the company said.
Amazon plans on using the insights from the test satellites to finalize work on Project Kuiper production satellites. Expect the first batches to start launching during the first half of next year. The company then plans on kicking off beta tests with select commercial customers later in 2024. However, Amazon has some serious catching up to do with Starlink, which is already serving 2 million customers across the globe.
