By Byron Kaye
SYDNEY (Reuters) -The Australian government-owned internet network hired Amazon’s untested startup satellite service to provide connectivity to people who cannot access its terrestrial network rather than Elon Musk’s Starlink.
From next year, low-Earth orbit satellites owned by Amazon’s Project Kuiper will start replacing two Australian government-owned satellites due for decommissioning in 2032, NBN Co and Amazon said in a joint statement on Tuesday.
The deal, for which financial terms were not disclosed, is designed to give high-speed internet to some 300,000 homes and businesses that NBN’s terrestrial network does not reach. The thousands of low-Earth orbit satellites are connected to each other through optical links and communicate with antennas and other connection points on the ground.
The deal represents a missed opportunity for Starlink, by far the world’s biggest provider of such network services and which already has more than 250,000 customers in Australia, according to industry data. Australia’s two biggest telecoms providers sell Starlink residential connection dishes and some government entities, including the Australian Electoral Commission, also have contracts with the company.
Starlink, a unit of Musk’s SpaceX rocket company, now has 8,000 fast-orbiting satellites since it began launching them in 2019, while Amazon’s service has just 78 since its first launch in April. NBN and Amazon said Project Kuiper would ultimately have more than 3,200.
NBN said the decision followed a rigorous procurement process, but did not say why it had chosen the Amazon service.
Starlink was not immediately available for comment.
“It is true that Amazon Kuiper has not launched services yet in Australia or globally, but they are reportedly pumping in about $15 billion into that programme,” said Gavin Williams, chief development officer for regional and remote services at NBN.
“We have every confidence that we’ve got a partner in Kuiper that will do what they say they’re going to do,” he added in an interview.
Asked if Musk’s ownership of Starlink played a part in the decision, Williams said only that NBN supplied critical infrastructure with regulatory and legal obligations and “technical, operational, and commercial imperatives that fall into that consideration were contemplated and ventilated through the procurement process.”
(Reporting by Byron Kaye and Alasdair Pal; Editing by Kate Mayberry)
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