Through an agreement signed this week in Seattle (USA), Vrio -the parent company of DirecTV Latin America and Sky Brasil, signed an alliance with Amazon to distribute satellite broadband services in the region. This will be carried out using the low orbit satellite technology of Project Kuiper from the company led by Jeff Bezos.
Under this alliance, Vrio plans to distribute Project Kuiper services to residential customers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia through its companies DirecTV Latin America and Sky Brasil. The idea of using this service, based on Project Kuiper’s low-latency, high-bandwidth satellite networkis to bring Internet connectivity mainly to areas where, otherwise, it would be difficult and more expensive to provide the service with physical infrastructure (fiber cabling).
The speeds that have been successfully tested so far are between 100 megabits per second and 400 Mbps. For business services 1 Gbps has been reached.
Darío Werthein, president of Vrio, had previously indicated that “This alliance with Project Kuiper is in line with our strategy of extending our services to South America and strengthens our regional leadership in connectivity, information, digital entertainment and promotion of innovation. We are busy bridging the technological gap and, even more so, the digital gap for our future generations. And the time is now. Our commitment translates into action. Providing Internet access throughout the region guarantees the development of communities; and that is a commitment for our company.”
“Over the last two years, Vrio has transformed itself from a satellite TV company into a media tech company committed to actions aimed at reducing the technological and educational gap,” he added.
Main benefits
“This alliance puts our experience at the disposal of clients who will benefit from contracting an Amazon service through Vrio, which will allow strong differentials: will have billing in local currency; customer service in each country with personalized service; local technical service and everything in the customer’s own language”explained Darío Werthein.
In dialogue with Trade Lucas Werthein, vice president of Vrio said: “Amazon has a culture where they are extremely careful with costs and always tend to offer the products and services they have as cheaply as possible.; Their prices are very competitive in general, in all the industries where they participate and from every point of view. this [alianza] It’s not going to be an exception. We are convinced that the proposal It is going to be better than any other satellite connectivity service that exists in terms of speed, in terms of latency, in terms of reliability and also in terms of price. It is a fundamental issue in both Amazon’s strategy and ours.”
What is Project Kuiper?
For many, the only company seeking to provide connectivity through low orbit satellites is Starlink, one of Elon Musk’s companies. But they are wrong. Project Kuiper is the name of the Amazon initiative that since 2018 has sought to bring high-speed satellite Internetalso using low orbit satellites that will work in conjunction with a global network of antennas, fiber and Internet connection points on the ground.
And although Blue Origin is the company of Jeff Bezos -founder of Amazon- for space issues, this Project Kuiper pertenece a Amazonspecifically to the same Devices and Services division responsible for Kindle, Echo, Fire TV, eero, Ring and other technological devices of the company.
And since when will you have access to that service through DirecTV?
According to Vrio sources and information provided by Amazon itself, It is expected that in July 2025, customers in the southern part of the continent will begin to have the service. Progressively – and heading north – more areas will be enabled where Project Kuiper is available.
“That is a deployment that Amazon makes of its satellite constellation, which begins from south to north and from north to south. In the case of the southern hemisphere, which is what concerns us, The coverage will begin from south to north and it is a matter of how the satellites are launched and put into operation. But Amazon has a huge incentive inward to try to implement as quickly as possible, so that’s the tipping point. We do not have an exact date of arrival in Peru, but probably after mid-2025, as the months go by, all the territories will expand at the speed we can,” Lucas Werthein details to this newspaper.
This project has a license from the US FCC that requires it to have at least half of the satellite constellation (its initial plan is to have 3,236), implemented and operational by July 2026. However, they have already been carrying out tests and deployments since October 2023 and They hope to have their first global customers by the end of this year.