Vodafone and its African subsidiary, Vodacom, have made a deal to use Amazon’s yet-to-be-deployed Project Kuiper satellite broadband network to extend the reach of their 4G/5G cellular networks.
The deal, which was announced this week by Amazon as well as British-based Vodafone, would give Project Kuiper business connections in Europe and Africa that are comparable to Amazon’s previously announced partnership with Verizon for extending telecom services in the U.S.
Vodafone and its subsidiaries provide mobile and fixed telecom service to more than 300 million customers in 17 countries, and partner with mobile networks in 46 other countries. “This is our second telco partnership, and we look forward to working with other telcos,” an Amazon spokesperson told me in an email.
Like SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, Project Kuiper aims to provide broadband internet service to millions of people around the world who are underserved. SpaceX is far ahead of Amazon: While SpaceX has deployed thousands of Starlink satellites and has more than 1.5 million subscribers, Amazon hasn’t yet deployed a single Kuiper satellite.
Kuiper’s first prototypes are due for launch as early as this month, kicking off what’s expected to be an ambitious campaign to deploy half of the network’s planned 3,236 satellites by mid-2026. The satellite operations for Kuiper and Starlink are both based in Redmond, Wash.
Project Kuiper’s plan calls for selling satellite terminals to end users, as well as working with partners to connect geographically dispersed cellular antennas with the companies’ core telecom networks. The latter strategy is the focus of the newly announced deal with Vodafone and Vodacom.