Amazon Web Services' ground station-as-a-service offering has launched a location in the Middle East.
The ground station in Bahrain joins similar sites for satellite connectivity in Oregon and Ohio.
Beyond the clouds
Satellite customers pay for antenna access time on demand, which Amazon claims can save users up to 80 percent of their ground station costs, when compared to the traditional approach of leasing antennas at stations, or building entirely new ground stations.
AWS' ground stations are located near to the company's data centers, so data can be processed in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, and stored on the cloud service. AWS opened three data centers in Bahrain back in July.
The company previously said that it expects to operate ten ground stations by the end of the year, built in partnership with defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
In the next issue of DCD Magazine, we talk to AWS Ground Station GM Shayn Hawthorne about the company's plans to dominate the market. We also head to Goonhilly Earth Station, the storied earth receiving station which recently launched its own colocation service.
