In preparation for a competition with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and others to provide broadband internet globally, On Tuesday, Amazon announced it would begin providing its first services soon after launching its first internet satellites in the first half of 2024. Also, it disclosed the designs of the terminals that will link clients to the service. Amazon plans to invest over $10 billion in Project Kuiper to create a network of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit.
Later this year, the firm announced that Project Kuiper, an Amazon subsidiary that develops satellite internet, will start mass-producing the satellites. They are the first of more than 3,000 satellites the internet giant aims to place in low-Earth orbit over the next few years.
“We’ll be beta testing with commercial customers in 2024,” Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon devices, said at a conference in Washington. The 2024 deployment goal would keep Amazon on track to meet a legal need to launch half its 3,236-satellite Kuiper network by 2026. Limp, in charge of Amazon’s consumer devices division, said the firm intends to produce “three to five” satellites daily to meet that objective.
Amazon sees its experience manufacturing millions of devices from its consumer electronics powerhouse as an advantage over rival SpaceX, the Musk-owned space company whose Starlink network already has about 4,000 satellites in orbit. SpaceX plans to invest more than $10 billion in the Kuiper network.
Amazon intends to launch two prototype satellites early this year with a new rocket from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance. The 2024 launch, delivering the initial production satellites, will be the first of many more in a fast deployment campaign using rockets Amazon acquired in 2021 and 2022.
The business also unveiled a trio of terminals, or antennas, on Tuesday that would link clients to its Kuiper spacecraft in orbit. According to a statement from Amazon, the “typical customer terminal”—11-inch square antennas—will cost the business less than $400 per unit and offer users internet speeds of 400 megabits per second.
More than a million consumers have utilized SpaceX’s $599 per terminal consumer Starlink terminals and various custom terminals for corporations and governments, according to Jonathan Hofeller, head of Starlink enterprise sales at SpaceX.
Amazon’s “most affordable” network terminal will be a smaller, square-shaped mobile antenna that is 7 inches wide and weighs one pound; the business did not disclose the price.
With internet rates of up to 1 gigabit per second, Amazon’s most extensive, “most capable” antenna type, “built for enterprise, government, and telecommunications applications,” will measure 19 by 30 inches and take about 30 seconds to download a high-definition feature-length movie.
