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AWS Ground Station is now widely available. The service is designed to help AWS customers access and manage data from satellites. That’s what Venturebeat reports.

AWS made Ground Station available as a preview in November last year. However, the service is now open to all AWS users. The service includes the installation of satellite ground stations and antennae close to AWS’ data centres. The first two are now fully operational.

Satellites are being used for more and more things, such as weather forecasting and video broadcasting. However, organisations that want to use data from satellites have to lease antennas that can talk to satellites. In addition, all kinds of other infrastructure is needed to manage and send the data. This includes, for example, storage, servers and networks.

Another problem is that it is not always possible to talk to the satellite in question. This is only possible if the satellite flies over, which means that there is only a limited time slot. In addition, the data must be downloaded to the earth via a downlink and then brought to the correct data centre via the Internet. That doesn’t make the latency great.

Ground Station

So that’s where AWS Ground Station comes in. Companies, universities and any other customer of Amazon’s cloud service can schedule access to antennas via the Management Console, as with other company services. The payment is then made on the basis of use. A contract is not necessary.

Moreover, the latency is considerably lower with the service of AWS. After all, the company has placed the antennas in a place where it already had data centres. This allows the data to be stored directly in the customer’s VPC as soon as it reaches the ground via a downlink. This gives the customer direct access to his data.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.