Have you guys heard about “AWS Ground Station''?
It is explained like this on their official website.
AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications, process data, and scale your operations without having to worry about building or managing your own ground station infrastructure.
I’m always amazed by AWS’s technologies. Who would've thought they even use satellites?
Satellite Communications
When I was reading about the service, a question popped into my head, “what’s the overview of satellite communication?”.
My own interpretation after I did research is, it enables global communications that allow data to be obtained from long distant locations.
How to use
Let’s see what we can use AWS Ground Station for.
AWS Ground Station provides our satellite antennas direct access to AWS services for faster, simpler and more cost-effective storage and processing of downloaded data. This allows you to reduce data processing and analysis times for use cases like weather prediction or natural disaster imagery from hours to minutes or seconds. This also enables you to quickly create business rules and workflows to organize, structure, route the satellite data before it can be analyzed and incorporated into key applications such as imaging analysis and weather forecasting. Key AWS services include Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon VPC, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams.
Since data can be downloaded efficiently with this feature, it is expected to be used with other features provided by AWS for data analysis and machine learning.
Application
I did a long explanation about AWS Ground Station, but now let’s move on to how to use this service.
Believe it or not, it only takes 5 easy steps to apply!
log into the AWS console
Select AWS Ground Station
3. Select a base station
4. Fill out and submit the form
5. You will receive a usage guide from AWS after they accept your request
The price list is the following
Contact Type | Pricing |
Narrowband Reserved | $3 per minute |
Wideband Reserved | $10 per minute |
Narrowband On-Demand | $10 per minute |
Wideband On-Demand | $22 per minute |
Summary
It is a service that uses satellite communications.
It’s available for personal use in per-minute increments.
As of 2022 December, the following Ground Station Antenna locations are available
US (Oregon), US (Ohio), Middle East (Bahrain), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Ireland), Africa (Cape Town), US (Hawaii), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and South America (Punta Arenas)
It’s a fully managed service.
That’s it for today!
This blog post is translated from a blog post written by Sakina Nakagawa on our Japanese website Beyond Co..