Amazon Leo aims to double its speed as it prepares to roll out its satellite broadband network

REDMOND, Wash. – Chris Weber isn’t ready to say yet when Amazon Leo will start allowing individual customers to sign up for satellite broadband service, but if it does, you’ll have the right closet at the start.

During a recent interview at Amazon Leo’s Mission Operations Center in Redmond, Weber wore running shoes in a shade of purple with the Leo logo emblazoned on the back.

“It’s not purple, it’s krypton,” Weber, who came from GitLab in 2024 to become Amazon Leo’s vice president of consumer and enterprise business, told GeekWire. “Krypton is the color that our thrusters fire into space, so we chose that. It was obviously available in the Amazon palette. … There’s a lot of meaning and thought that went into our products, and we’re excited about that.”

It’s been a year since Amazon Leo, formerly known as Project Kuiper, began its multibillion-dollar campaign to send thousands of satellites to provide broadband Internet access around the world. So far, 304 satellites have been used during 11 launches – and Weber said the Amazon Leo team will be running twice as many next year.

“The theme going forward is acceleration,” he said. “What we’ve said is that in the next 12 months, we’re going to double the number of launches, satellites, and so on, so it’s all about accelerating that.”

Amazon Leo has already made its service available to a select group of business customers in preview, and Weber has signaled that the official launch of the commercial service is not that far off. But Amazon Leo won’t be available everywhere at once.

“What we have said publicly is that in the coming months – so it’s not yet years – we will launch, and that will be in the northern and southern hemisphere, because you need enough satellites to have an area where your customer can see the satellite,” he said. So we’re going to launch that in the next few months, our consistent service. And then as we add more satellites, that coverage will expand geographically.”

There’s a lot to do: Even if Amazon Leo doubles its speed next year, it will still lag far behind SpaceX’s Starlink network, which currently has more than 10,000 satellites in orbit and more than 12 million subscribers.

Closing the gap with Starlink is not the only thing driving the acceleration of Amazon Leo: Under the terms of its license from the Federal Communications Commission, Amazon had to release part of its 3,232 first-generation satellites planned by the end of July. The company wants a two-year extension; last month, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the agency was “still reviewing the paperwork” at Amazon’s request.

Even assuming the FCC grants an extension and Leo’s speed doubles by mid-2027, Amazon will have to increase its speed to reach 1,616 satellites by mid-2028, and accelerate even more to get all 3,232 satellites into low-Earth orbit by mid-2029.

Waiting for the rockets

In its filings with the FCC, Amazon said it had to scale back its delivery schedule due to limited availability of launch vehicles. It doesn’t help that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture – one of the providers of the launch of Amazon Leo – had to temporarily stop his new rocket New Glenn due to an unrelated launch failure.

The rocket shortage has forced Amazon to scale back its production rate of five satellites a day at its Kirkland manufacturing facility. Weber said hundreds of satellites are stored at Amazon’s processing facility in Florida, waiting to be lifted.

“Last I heard, we have six more next [batches] piled up in the dispensers, ready to be picked up by those who will pick them up,” he said.

Weber expressed confidence that high-lift rockets from Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Arianespace will support a higher rate of launches next year. Amazon is even buying a launch from SpaceX to speed up satellite deployment.

“We have a contract for the launch of 100 rockets, the largest in the history of space,” he said. “So, obviously, the commitment is there. We continue to look for ways to get more launches and launches.”

Back in 2020, Amazon said it planned to spend more than $10 billion to spin off Amazon Leo. Since then, some industry observers have estimated that the cost could reach $20 billion. But the proposed cost will be more compared to the expected payment.

Just this week, a market study commissioned by Amazon and conducted by Oxford Economics estimated that broadband services provided by low earth satellites could add between 32 and 863 billion dollars to global GDP by 2035, and support between 800,000 and 21 million jobs worldwide. By 2035, somewhere between 78 million and 421 million people could use satellite broadband, depending on which scenarios analyzed by the British consulting firm actually play out.

Inside Mission Control

Amazon has been careful to protect the “secret sauce” of its satellite operations — meaning you’d be hard-pressed to find full-frontal images of its fully deployed satellites, or images showing display systems inside the Mission Operations Center in Redmond.

Suffice it to say that the MOC is positioned somewhat like NASA Mission Control in Houston, but on a smaller scale. Most of the time, satellite operations are overseen by a few controllers, but that number can swell to around 20 crew members at launch.

The current facility is larger than the one used by Amazon to put prototype satellites into orbit starting in 2023. We opened for business shortly before the launch of the first operational satellites. A business-style snack bar is just around the corner from the rows of computers, and an opening in the center back wall allows guests to peek from the living room outside the doors.

Amazon has also been careful when it comes to satellite broadband pricing. In last year’s letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy promised that Leo’s services would come at a “lower cost than alternatives.”

The company has defined three categories of service:

• Nano: A portable 7-by-7-inch antenna for download speeds of up to 100 megabits per second.
• Pro: 11-by-11-inch antenna that supports 400 Mbps download.
• Ultra: The 20-by-30-inch antenna delivers up to 1 gigabit per second for downloads and 400 Mbps for uploads.

“We showed 1.3 gigabits of video downlink and over 400 gigabits on the uplink, which is amazing,” Weber said. “So we feel very happy in its construction. Its stability, quality is our one duty as we do that.”

Although Amazon isn’t ready to reveal its pricing, either for terminals or subscriptions, Weber said his team has a good handle on what the price should be.

“There’s a lot of work we’ve been doing over the years that looks at a lot of different external metrics and internal metrics,” he said. “The good news is that, especially on the government and business side, you’re getting demand signals every day, and we’ve been talking to customers every day. …

Satellite synergies

Amazon is also fine-tuning its strategy to take advantage of synergies between Leo and its other lines of business, starting with Amazon Web Services.

“We announced our private connectivity option with AWS, where if you’re a business or a government customer, you can go from your customer’s terminal to your phone to your AWS data center or computer center or your private data center without touching the Internet,” said Weber. “That’s very important. And, boy, does that really affect business and government customers.”

Regular consumers will see synergies as well, possibly involving Prime Video, Fire TV, Ring, Zoox and Amazon’s delivery services. “Without announcing anything, I can say that we are very excited to bring new differentiated value to our customers across the entire collection of Amazon products and services,” said Weber.

Like SpaceX, Amazon Leo is scoring in-flight connectivity deals with the likes of Delta and JetBlue — and exploring the latest frontier in connectivity: direct-to-device satellite service.

“We just announced the acquisition of Globalstar and our partnership with Apple directly on the device,” Weber said. “That’s been part of our strategy from the beginning, but it’s actually starting to expand the use cases.”

Amazon is expected to follow in on Globalstar’s expansion plans and take it to the next level, but it won’t wrap its direct-to-device service in Amazon Leo’s broadband offering. The way Weber sees it, the Direct-to-device market is different than the satellite broadband market, at least in the short to long term.

“What it does directly on the device is open up new situations where people don’t have connectivity today, and now you’re taking these billions of mobile phones and making them connected so you can send voice messages, those kinds of things,” he said. “The way I think about it is that the pieces of the puzzle and the use cases are expanded, with broadband and a specific device versus a replacement.”

Some communication clients may want both. “You can see something in the car where they want broadband coverage, but also the ability to have a direct device, which is low speed but gives you a wide connection,” said Weber.

What else does Weber see in his crystal ball? What will Amazon Leo look like a year from now?

“Well, I’ll tell you, we’re going to be in service, and we’re going to have more satellites up there, so we’re going to have wider areas,” he said. “What I talk about with our team all the time, and what we’re focused on, is building a service that customers love. That’s our first, second and third job – because if we get that right, when we grow, everything else is possible.”

As Weber said, the Amazon Leo is likely to be available initially to mid-north and mid-south customers. Internet users can plug in their zip code and email address into an online form at Leo.Amazon.com to receive updates on project progress and availability in their area.