Vodafone teams up with Amazon’s Project Kuiper to extend 5G reach

Vodafone plans to work with Amazon’s low Earth orbit satellite constellation Project Kuiper to extend the reach of its 4G and 5G telecoms networks in Europe and Africa.

The British mobile operator said Project Kuiper’s high-bandwidth, low-latency satellites would be used to connect mobile base stations in remote locations to its core networks, eliminating the need for fibre-based or fixed wireless links.

Amazon is preparing to test two prototype satellites in the coming months before starting to deploy production satellites in 2024 for its network, which will compete with Elon Musk’s Starlink, OneWeb and others.