Amazon begins a new tech order: spend $10 billion to provide internet connectivity and most possibly disintermediate current players by bundling cloud hosting, digital commerce and broadband services. Yes, get a small equipment and your Amazon Web Services can move via Amazon pipes instead of MTN, 9Mobile and others. And those Amazon Prime movies, music, etc go meter-free because Amazon is the “network carrier”.
One monthly fee, your entertainment and data needs are handled: “Amazon plans to use Project Kuiper not only to offer broadband internet service to billions of potential customers around the globe who are currently underserved, but also to facilitate Amazon’s other lines of business, ranging from online retail sales to Amazon Web Services’ cloud computing platform (and most likely Amazon Prime’s streaming-video offerings).” The future would be one of abundance: SpaceX, OneWeb, Telesat and Project Kuiper will change the order on data. Data could be free with value captured through services: 2022.
The Federal Communications Commission has authorized Amazon’s plans for a Project Kuiper constellation of 3,236 satellites that would provide broadband internet access across a wide swath of the globe — but on the condition that it doesn’t unduly interfere with previously authorized satellite ventures.
In response, Amazon said it would invest more than $10 billion in the project. “We’re off to the races,” Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, said in a statement. (We’re passing along the full statement below.)
The FCC’s non-interference requirements and other conditions are laid out in a 24-page order that was adopted on Wednesday and released today. The ruling addresses objections registered by Amazon’s rivals — including SpaceX, OneWeb and Telesat.
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This is both thrilling and dizzying at the same time, and as I read, I am concurrently thinking on where small guys can fit in and build their own business empires within the constructs.
With the way the big guys are sending satellites up there, we don’t know if there will still be space by the time our people start sending theirs. They are already exploring Mars, while we are still dragging land here, killing people…
The way things are going, many of the companies that seem to be doing Ok for now could be out of business in less than a decade from now.
The only permanence is Knowledge, as long as you posses the relevant one, you will keep playing along.
at times when I look at the way and how fast things are moving I could only but wonder and ponder how industries will be disrupted in the next 2 decades, in fact it is kind of scary because countries, especially underdeveloped ones, would almost become powerless and almost obsolete (in terms of being able to influence and capture more value from their citizen than tech companies), right now facebook and Amazon are stronger and far richer than most countries in Africa. Africans needs to wake up, if it they don’t want to end up being the dumping ground of tech companies.