One of the flagship announcements of the GSMA’s MWC Los Angeles event was Verizon commissioning Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite to fuel its rural broadband expansion. Not to be outdone in the dodgy announcement race, Dish Network shortly followed up by declaring that it would be crowdsourcing 5G capacity from LPWAN upstart Helium. Thankfully, Verizon has not made the misstep of declaring a date for the service – which brings it up to parity with AT&T, which announced a similar prospective deal with OneWeb. However, OneWeb at least has satellites in orbit, and SpaceX has an unnamed customer signed up for a similar backhaul deal. If Amazon’s Blue Origin offshoot is an indication, Kuiper is many years away from commercial viability.…