Amazon Leo leaders provide an inside look at the past and future of the satellite broadband network

Amazon Leo is months away from the commercial launch of the satellite broadband network, but there is already at least one satisfied user: Rajeev Badyal, who leads the Amazon Leo team.

“I was in a remote location last week,” Badyal said today at the annual Technology Alliance State of Technology Luncheon in downtown Seattle. “I had a terminal … I was in an area surrounded by mountains. I went, ‘There’s no way we’re going to get here.’ The group said, ‘Just go put it there, we’ll deal with the rest.’ And they did. It worked flawlessly.”

Badyal said he and his wife even streamed the film in an isolated area where their phones could not get a signal. “We were both like two kids who had never seen the Internet before, discovering the Internet for the first time,” he recalled.

For now, Badyal and other insiders are the only ones trying out the Amazon Leo satellite service on a beta testing basis, but it won’t be long before the first customers can sign up.

Badyal can’t wait. “That, to me, is a milestone,” he said. “That’s why we’ve all been working on this — to get it out there, to get it in the hands of customers.”

Amazon Leo is not going to enter a place it has never been before. For years, SpaceX’s Starlink network has enjoyed a dominant position in the market for satellite broadband services through Earth orbit. Starlink currently has more than 10,000 satellites in orbit, serving more than 10 million customers worldwide.

Amazon Leo currently has just over 300 satellites in orbit, one year after the start of its launch campaign. Next year, the team expects the pace to increase significantly. “Just over a year ago, we used to do one satellite a month, and that was 24/7,” Badyal said. “Now we can make tens of satellites a week at our factory in Kirkland.”

By mid-2029, Amazon will have launched more than 3,200 satellites on rockets provided by United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, Arianespace and SpaceX, under the terms of its license from the Federal Communications Commission. And it has already received preliminary FCC approval to add another 4,500 second-generation satellites to the network.

The pieces of the puzzle are coming together on the consumer side as well: Although Amazon Leo has not yet announced pricing and availability plans, it has released information about three levels of service, offering downlink speeds ranging from 100 megabits per second to 1 gigabit per second. This week, the FCC released information about Amazon Leo Wi-Fi routers.

During the lunch presentation, Badyal and Chris Weber, Amazon Leo’s vice president of business and product, shared a few inside stories about the development of the network.

How it all started

Before joining Amazon, Badyal worked on the Starlink satellite development project in Redmond, Wash., and was famously fired by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in June 2018. Not long after, Badyal met Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who he said was “very enthusiastic and cheap” about creating a satellite broadband network.

“The next thing you knew, I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to come and help you build this planet and make this vision come true,'” Badyal recalled. “And join us in October.”

Badyal and five other engineers are designing a satellite constellation in a curtained office. “These were black curtains, and it actually said, ‘Get out,'” Badyal said. Developers wrote an idea script that ran longer than Amazon’s traditional six pages. “It was more difficult to write this document than to build a constellation,” Badyal joked.

“In January of 2019, we were in front of Jeff. He had just come back from the income statement, and he had a 40-page document in his hand,” Badyal said. “He puts it on the table, and says, ‘I like this thing.’ I will never forget those words: ‘I love these things.’

How Project Kuiper Became Amazon Leo

Initially, the network was called Project Kuiper. That was a reference to the inner baseball of the icy Kuiper Belt that orbits the planets of the solar system, similar to the belts of satellites that orbit Earth.

“Project Kuiper was the name of the project, so we knew at some point that we would have to change that from a project name to an official product name,” Weber said. “A few things went into it: First, we had to have a name that was popular around the world. Second, it had to be easy to say.”

“Kuiper” never appeared. Weber recalled an internal video where dozens of promoters pronounced the word like “Ky-per, Kweeper, Cooper, etc.

“Leo,” on the other hand, echoed. For one thing, it’s easy to pronounce. “Obviously Leo is a nod to the ‘low Earth cycle,’ so we like that,” Weber said. And putting “Amazon” in front of the name “says a lot, in terms of trust and credibility,” he said.

Points of technological change

Badyal said the most difficult challenge to solve is not related to the satellites themselves, but to building low-cost customer terminals.

“Our challenge was, can you combine what you call an antenna and a transmitter into one panel that is small enough and cost-effective?” he said. “We showed that in 2020. That was a critical point in the process, where you could say the floodgates were open.”

Another breakthrough came with the development of laser optical links that transmit data between the Amazon Leo satellites. Badyal said that the first test of satellite-to-satellite communication did not work because the satellites were not properly configured. “It’s always the config file that’s the problem,” he said. After the correction was made, the satellites successfully transmitted data at the target rate of 100 gigabits per second.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Badyal. “I had to call the team that night and just tell them about the amazing job they did. For me personally, it was emotional. I had to sit down for a while, to collect myself. And I was yelling, on the way, and my wife goes, ‘What happened?’

How satellite broadband will change the world

Weber said studying potential use cases for high-speed satellite communications is “one of the coolest things in my career.”

“I was in Argentina, and we visited a school where the students have one cell phone that everyone has to share with a connection that’s less than 3G. So it’s actually almost completely usable,” he said. “What the satellite will bring to those classes is a game changer, not only in that school [but for] that whole community.”

On the business side, Weber said that satellite communications will also provide a major boost to companies and manufacturing facilities in the event of a decline in global coverage. And he said there are “many cases of use” of government services, which involve communicating with first responders in remote areas.

“Everyone at Amazon Leo, they come to this not because it’s a job. It’s because this is a job to bring communication to underserved and underserved communities to consumers, government and businesses,” said Weber. “That’s what we wake up to every day.”