The Empire Strikes Back: The AT&T And Amazon LEO Alliance
Amazon LEO is showing the world that the satellite wars are just beginning. A recurring Silicon Valley theme has been that Starlink has a long term global monopoly on LEO telecommunication services. In fact, the term is 'global public utility'. Starlink supposedly has scale advantages and benefits from an insurmountable cost edge due to vertical integration in the form of satellite manufacturing and launching services. This is of course sheer hogwash. While SpaceX has a cost edge right now, it has no technology moat to preserve an edge long term over the rest of the industry. There is no patent barrier to creating a reusable launch vehicle. Several players including Blue Origin and the Chinese are close to perfecting reusable rockets. Just like Starlink, LEO is manufacturing its own satellites and its per unit costs are steadily falling. AT&T has agreed to migrate computer work loads to AWS with some of it involving Amazon's Outpost service. This involves Amazon provid...