Taking a big step towards its aim of delivering fast, affordable broadband through a constellation of over 3,000 low Earth orbit satellites, Amazon’s Project Kuiper has developed the antenna for its low-cost end-user satellite broadband terminals.
The Ka-band phased array antenna is based on a new architecture capable of delivering high-speed, low-latency broadband in a form factor that is smaller and lighter than legacy antenna designs, Amazon said this week.
The prototype that the company developed is already delivering speeds up to 400 Mbps (Megabits per second), and performance will continue to improve in future iterations, Amazon said.
“If you want to make a difference for unserved and underserved communities, you need to deliver service at a price that makes sense for customers,” Rajeev Badyal, VP of Technology for Project Kuiper at Amazon, said in a statement.
“This simple fact inspired one of our key tenets for Kuiper: to invent a light, compact phased array antenna that would allow us to produce an affordable customer terminal. It’s incredible to see such a small form factor delivering this type of speed and performance.”
Amazon is one of several companies focused on delivering high-speed Internet to underserved communities through a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s company SpaceX’s Starlink initiative has the same goal.
While SpaceX has already launched nearly 1,000 of its Starlink satellites and has even begun initial beta testing, Amazon is yet to launch any satellites, The Verge reported.
Amazon said that the most effective way to reduce terminal production costs is to decrease the size, weight, and complexity of its antenna.
This is difficult to do in the Ka-band, which requires more physical separation between transmit and receive antennas to cover its wide frequency range.
For this reason, legacy Ka-band antennas place the transmit antenna and receive antenna next to one another, requiring a larger surface area and increasing production costs.
“Our phased array antenna takes a different approach. Instead of placing antenna arrays adjacent to one another, we used tiny antenna element structures to overlay one over the other. This has never been accomplished in the Ka-band,” Amazon said.
Amazon said that the development is a critical part of the Kuiper System, and is one of many components being designed and tested at its new R&D facility in Redmond, Washington.
–IANS