The Amazon’s Kuiper Satellite Internet and Africa’s Unserved and Underserved Communities

By Nnamdi Odumody

Amazon will launch a constellation of 3,236 satellites to help people access high speed internet. The initiative called ’’Project Kuiper’’ will help the ecommerce giant increase global access to the internet.  Tesla is doing the same thing with Starlink. Also, OneWeb is also working in the same domain: using satellites to improve penetration of Internet usage.

The United Nations estimates that half of the world’s population, mainly in the developing world, will still not have access to the internet by the end of 2019. In January 2018, it outlined a series of targets that if met would drastically improve worldwide internet access by 2025.

As noted above, Amazon joins space exploration company SpaceX which plans to launch its own satellite internet service and fellow technology giants Facebook and Google which have launched Facebook Basic and Project Loon moonshot projects, respectively,  to provide internet connectivity to the next billion in emerging markets like Africa.

Project Kuiper is a new initiative to launch a constellation of Low Earth Orbit Satellites that will provide low latency, high speed broadband connectivity, to unserved and underserved communities around the world.

Project Kuiper is a new initiative to launch a constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites that will provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world. This is a long-term project that envisions serving tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet. We look forward to partnering on this initiative with companies that share this common vision.

Nigeria’s MainOne and Avanti Communications, a leading provider of satellite data communications services in Europe, Middle East and Africa, recently entered into a partnership to provide affordable broadband access to all Nigerians, irrespective of their locations, at affordable prices. This partnership which will see Avanti providing the latest Ka-band satellite communication services to ensure that enterprises, public locations including schools and hospitals as well as individuals, in the most remote areas of the country, benefit from the digital inclusion that reliable broadband connectivity provides.

MainOne should collaborate with Amazon on its Project Kuiper initiative to provide access to internet connectivity for all Nigerians, and the rest of West Africa, meeting the needs of millions of consumers across the country, and sub-region, who are currently without internet capacity, as this will lead to increase in the standard of living and the expansion of GDP.