Tuesday, 16 December 2025

Architecting Resilient Global Networks with Amazon LEO

At AWS re:Invent 2025, a joint presentation from Amazon LEO and AWS Global Infrastructure Services offered a detailed look at how non-terrestrial networks are being engineered to operate as part of modern global infrastructure. Nick Matthews, Principal Solutions Architect at Amazon LEO, and John Phillibert, Principal Network Development Engineer at AWS, focused not on consumer broadband headlines but on the architectural foundations needed to deliver resilient, low-latency connectivity at global scale.

The session provided a rare infrastructure-level walkthrough of how a low Earth orbit satellite network is being integrated directly with AWS edge and backbone services, and why this matters for enterprises, operators and critical infrastructure providers.

A LEO network designed like cloud infrastructure

Amazon LEO is building a constellation of more than 3,200 satellites in low Earth orbit, operating at altitudes between roughly 590 and 630 kilometres. From an infrastructure perspective, the key distinction from traditional geostationary satellite systems is not just lower latency, but the need to manage constant motion, frequent handovers and highly dynamic routing.

Satellites orbit the Earth approximately 16 times per day, remaining in view of a given location for only tens of seconds at a time. Rather than treating this as a constraint, Amazon LEO has designed the network using cloud-scale principles. Satellite positions, terminal locations and gateway connectivity are all highly predictable, allowing routing, frequency allocation and handover behaviour to be pre-computed and continuously optimised.

The result is a system that behaves far more like a terrestrial fibre or mobile network than a traditional satellite service, with expected round-trip latencies below 50 milliseconds and enterprise-grade throughput.

Terminals as hardened network edge devices

A significant portion of the engineering effort has been invested in user terminals. From an infrastructure viewpoint, these terminals act as the true network edge, and Amazon LEO has designed them to be rugged, simple to deploy and economically scalable.

Three terminal classes were outlined. A compact nano terminal supports low-power and IoT-style use cases. A pro terminal offers higher throughput in a device comparable in size to a laptop. At the high end, an ultra terminal supports gigabit-class connectivity suitable for large enterprise sites, temporary campuses or even data centre backup.

All terminals use electronically steered phased-array antennas, eliminating the need for mechanical movement and enabling rapid satellite tracking. From a deployment perspective, installation is intentionally straightforward, using standard Ethernet into existing enterprise or operational technology networks.

Space lasers and ground gateways as resilience tools

Beyond basic satellite-to-ground connectivity, Amazon LEO is deploying inter-satellite laser links. These links create a space-based backbone that allows traffic to be routed between satellites before descending to Earth. This has two important infrastructure implications.

First, it extends coverage to locations far from ground gateways, including oceans and air routes. Second, it introduces path diversity at a global scale. If a ground gateway is unavailable due to weather, fibre damage or power issues, traffic can be dynamically rerouted through alternative gateways without service interruption.

Ground gateways themselves are treated as high-capacity aggregation points, converting radio frequency links into terrestrial fibre connectivity. Their placement is closely aligned with AWS edge locations, minimising backhaul distance and reducing overall latency.

Tight integration with the AWS global backbone

John Phillibert’s contribution focused on why AWS infrastructure is central to making this model work at scale. AWS operates one of the world’s largest private global backbones, interconnecting regions, edge locations and direct connect sites over millions of kilometres of terrestrial and subsea fibre.

By anchoring Amazon LEO gateways directly into this backbone, satellite traffic enters a network designed for high automation, rapid fault remediation and consistent performance. Most network events within AWS are resolved automatically, without human intervention, which is essential when extending connectivity into remote or harsh environments.

Security is also built in at the infrastructure layer. AWS encrypts traffic across its backbone using MACsec, while Amazon LEO adds its own end-to-end encryption from terminal to point of presence. Even physical access to gateways or satellites yields only encrypted data, an important consideration for critical national infrastructure and regulated industries.

Infrastructure patterns for resilience and continuity

Several architectural patterns emerged repeatedly during the session. One is the use of Amazon LEO as a physically diverse connectivity path. Fibre cuts, natural disasters and power outages remain common failure modes in terrestrial networks, even in developed markets. A non-terrestrial path introduces true geographical and physical diversity, rather than simply logical redundancy.

Another pattern is rapid site enablement. In many industrial or logistics environments, waiting months for fibre or microwave links is not viable. A satellite terminal that can be shipped, installed and operational in days enables faster deployment of digital infrastructure, with terrestrial connectivity added later if required.

For more mature environments, Amazon LEO can complement existing architectures such as SD-WAN, private interconnects or direct cloud access. Integration with AWS Transit Gateway and Direct Connect allows traffic to remain private end to end, avoiding exposure to the public internet.

Extending compute and control to the edge

The infrastructure implications extend beyond connectivity alone. Reliable, high-bandwidth links enable changes in where compute and control systems are located. The session highlighted scenarios where local data centres exist solely because connectivity is unreliable. With improved resilience, workloads can be shifted to cloud regions, local zones or managed edge platforms.

In operational technology environments, this supports new models for monitoring, analytics and remote operation. SCADA systems, industrial sensors and video feeds can be securely backhauled to central platforms for analysis, while still maintaining local control loops where required.

This is less about replacing existing infrastructure overnight and more about enabling gradual architectural evolution, starting with connectivity and extending into compute placement and operational models.

A non-terrestrial network built for infrastructure scale

What stood out from the presentation was not just the technology itself, but the way it is being engineered. Amazon LEO is not positioned as a standalone satellite service, but as an extension of cloud and network infrastructure, designed using the same principles of automation, resilience and integration that underpin hyperscale data centres.

For telecom infrastructure professionals, the message was clear. Non-terrestrial networks are no longer niche overlays. When tightly integrated with terrestrial backbones, edge platforms and security frameworks, they become a foundational component of global connectivity strategies.

As Amazon LEO moves through its enterprise preview and towards service launch in 2026, its impact is likely to be felt less in marketing headlines and more in the quiet redesign of how resilient networks are built, extended and operated at global scale.

The talk is embedded below:

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