Amazon Opens Ground Station Satellite Service Allowing On-Demand Antenna Time

Amazon has started its Ground Station satellite service, opening the first two of 12 stations planned for major corporations to store data in space, send it to Earth and control the satellites processing the data.

The stations, managed by Amazon Web ServicesOpens a new window , are located in Oregon and Ohio, and the network eventually will spread across the globe as construction wraps on the others in the next year, company executives say.

The service, launched six months ago to win over the satellite service business, will allow customers to use the stations’ antennas on a per-minute basis and pay only for the time used. The on-demand ground stations will operate near Amazon’s data centers and provide access to Amazon’s cloud services.

With satellites used increasingly by businesses, universities and governments for various projects including communications, weather forecasting and surface imaging, Amazon is going after the antennas-for-hire market. Most corporations and not-for-profit organizations would find it prohibitively expensive and too tech-intensive to build or lease a network of ground antennas that communicate with satellites that move through space, as well as building the accompanying server farms to process the data.

Further, customers need business workflows in place to deal with the data downlinked from satellites and glean any value from it, which also requires significant capital investment and operational costs to get the service up and running.

Instead, Amazon says corporate customers can save as much as 80% of their ground station costsOpens a new window and rely on the service’s expanding worldwide footprint of ground stations. Customers can use the Amazon Web Services Management Console to book antenna time, as they can do with Amazon’s other cloud servicesOpens a new window .

Shayn Hawthone, the general manager of the satellite service, said that satellites offer customers a “way to build applications that help humans explore space and improve life on Earth, but the cost and difficulty of building and maintaining the infrastructure necessary to downlink and process the data has historically been prohibitive for all but the most well-funded organizations.”

He added, “The goal of AWS Ground Station is to make space communications ubiquitous and to make ground stations simple and easy to use.”

Amazon says the potential use cases for businesses include radar satellite imagery of various business facilities like parking lots, logistic centers and retail outlets to measure vehicles, traffic and customer flow patterns — even in cloudy or adverse weather conditions.

Ground Station can be used alongside other AWS servicesOpens a new window such as machine learning and analytics to assess operational trends in real-time. “These insights,” a company statement says, “can be rapidly streamed to relevant business analysts and decision makers anywhere in the world.”

Peter Platzer, the chief executive of Spire Global, a  space-to-cloud data and analytics company based in San Francisco, says his firm has found the service useful. “Spire,” he said, “has witnessed a heightened awareness and an increasingly global need for satellite-based, Earth-observation data for business, especially in the fields of weather, maritime and aviation.

“The flexibility of AWS Ground Station gives Spire the ability to satisfy that growing customer demand by flexibly augmenting our own global ground network capabilities,” he adds. “With Amazon we can collaboratively build a platform for a new kind of data solution which is rapidly becoming an industry standard.”

Customers of Myriota, an Australia-based satellite Internet of Things provider, can send small messages at very low cost from anywhere on the planet and uses Amazon Web Services for processing and cloud-based delivery. By securely delivering data to low-Earth orbit nano-satellites, Myriota provides IoT connectivity to remote locales where land-based message providers cannot operate, such as oceans, the Australian outback, and the Sudanese desert.

“With massive scale, long battery life and direct-to-orbit connectivity for IoT, Myriota is helping customers with vital applications, such as sensor telemetry, low-value asset tracking and device monitoring and control,” said David Haley, Myriota’s chief technology officer. “The AWS Ground Station network provides an exciting opportunity to increase operational efficiency and reliability for our customers at massive scale.”

Other customers and partners already using the service include Capella Space, D-Orbit, Maxar Technologies, NSLComm, Open Cosmos and Thales Alenia Space.

The other large providers of cloud services, such as Google and Microsoft, have also built global networks of data centers. Traditionally, the centers are connected by overland cables to computer networks to process a high volume of data messages with minimal delay.

The data-center sector has recently begun a drive to deliver high-speed Internet service by satellites, which can provide more data than cable such as high-resolution imagery of the Earth.

Facebook, for example, has announced it’s using data from satellites and machine learning to map human movement and demographics.