Iridium Communications announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services this week, to develop a satellite-based network called CloudConnect for Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
"We're really covering the whole planet ... with terrestrial networks today it's still only 10 percent or 20 percent" of the Earth, Iridium CEO Matt Desch told CNBC on Thursday. "Everybody today can connect pretty easily with very little effort. Now that Amazon has put our language into the cloud platform, they can extend their applications to the satellite realm."
CloudConnect, which the company expects to launch in 2019, makes Iridium "the first, and only, satellite provider now connected to" Amazon Web Services, Desch said. The CloudConnect network will focus on "where cellular technologies aren't," Desch said, bringing the rest of the world within reach of AWS.
Amazon has been looking to hire people to work on "interconnecting space system networks," CNBC reported earlier this month. The company has never publicly discussed such a project.
Shares of Iridium rose 7.1 percent in trading, hitting an all-time high of $21.98 a share.
dftba-ftw on October 1st, 2018 at 00:37 UTC »
ITT: Nobody Reads the Article
Irridium has been working on satellite internet for a long while now.
The Amazon partnership is to integrate amazon services to make it easy for IOT devices to utalize Irridium's network.
So if Irridium's ISP service is expensive/exploitative as fuck it has nothing to do with Amazon.
redvelvet92 on September 30th, 2018 at 23:56 UTC »
So when is SpaceX going to partner with Azure to do the same thing.
cockOfGibraltar on September 30th, 2018 at 22:32 UTC »
Isn't SpaceX working on a satellite internet thing too? I wonder how they will compare. The internet provider landscape with truly change if there are two additional providers of high speed internet globally available. Think of how that could effect markets with only one or two providers of internet!