Amazon Leo aims to double its pace as it gets set to roll out its satellite broadband network

REDMOND, Wash. — Chris Weber isn’t ready to say yet exactly when Amazon Leo will start letting individual customers sign up for satellite broadband service, but when it happens, he’ll have the right wardrobe for the debut.

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

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

It’s been a year since Amazon Leo, formerly known as Project Kuiper, began its multibillion-dollar campaign to send up thousands of satellites to provide broadband internet access across the globe. So far, 304 satellites have been deployed over the course of 11 launches — and Weber said the Amazon Leo team will be running twice as hard in the year ahead.

“The theme moving forward is acceleration,” he said. “What we’ve said is that over the next 12 months, we’ll double the number of launches, satellites, et cetera, so everything is about accelerating that.”

Amazon Leo has already been making its service available to a select group of enterprise customers on a preview basis, and Weber signaled that the official launch of commercial service isn’t all that far away. But Amazon Leo won’t be available everywhere all at once.

“What we’ve said publicly is that in the coming months — so it’s not years away — we’ll launch, and that’ll be in the northern and southern hemisphere, because you need enough satellites to have coverage where your customer terminal is seeing a satellite,” he said. “And so we’ll launch that in the next couple of months, our fixed service. And then as we get more and more satellites up, that coverage will expand inward geographically.”

There’s a lot of catching up to do: Even if Amazon Leo doubles its pace over the next year, it’ll still be 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 isn’t the only factor motivating Amazon Leo’s speedup: Under the terms of its license from the Federal Communications Commission, Amazon was supposed to deploy half of its planned 3,232 first-generation satellites by the end of July. The company is seeking a two-year extension; last month, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the agency was still “reviewing the paperwork” for Amazon’s request.

Even assuming the FCC grants the extension and Leo’s pace doubles by mid-2027, Amazon would have to increase its pace further to get to 1,616 satellites by mid-2028, and then speed up even more to get all 3,232 satellites in low Earth orbit by mid-2029.

Waiting for rockets

In its filings with the FCC, Amazon said it had to slow down its deployment schedule due to the limited availability of launch vehicles. It doesn’t help that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture — one of the launch providers for Amazon Leo — had to ground its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket temporarily due to an unrelated launch failure last month.

The rocket shortage forced Amazon to throttle back from its target production rate of five satellites a day at its Kirkland manufacturing facility. Weber said hundreds of satellites are in storage at Amazon’s processing facility in Florida, waiting for liftoff.

“The last I heard, we have like the next six [batches] stacked in the dispensers, ready to go for the launch providers to pick up,” he said.

Weber voiced confidence that heavy-lift rockets from Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Arianespace will support a higher launch rate in the year ahead. Amazon is even buying launches from SpaceX to accelerate satellite deployment.

“We’ve contracted for 100 rocket launches, the largest in space history,” he said. “And so, obviously, the commitment is there. We continue to look for ways to acquire additional launches and move launches up.”

Back in 2020, Amazon said it planned to spend more than $10 billion to get Amazon Leo off the ground. Since then, some industry observers have estimated the cost could amount to as much as $20 billion. But the projected costs would be more than matched by the expected payoff.

Just this week, a market study commissioned by Amazon and conducted by Oxford Economics estimated that broadband services provided by satellites in low Earth orbit could add between $32 billion and $863 billion 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 be using satellite broadband, depending on which of the scenarios analyzed by the British-based advisory firm actually plays out.

Inside Mission Control

Amazon has been careful about protecting the “secret sauce” of its satellite operation — which means you’d be hard-pressed to find full-frontal photos of its fully deployed satellites, or pictures showing the display systems inside its Mission Operations Center in Redmond.

Suffice it to say that the MOC is laid out much like NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, but on a smaller scale. Most of the time, satellite operations are monitored by a handful of controllers, but that number can swell to about 20 team members for a launch.

The current center is larger than the facility that Amazon used for putting a couple of prototype satellites through their paces starting in 2023. It opened for business not long before the first launch of operational satellites. A corporate-style snack bar is around the corner from the rows of computer consoles, and a porthole installed on the center’s back wall lets visitors peek in from the lounge outside the doors.

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

The company has described three tiers of service:

• Nano: 7-by-7-inch portable antenna for download speeds up to 100 megabits per second.
• Pro: 11-by-11-inch antenna supporting 400 Mbps downloads.
• Ultra: 20-by-30-inch antenna, delivering up to 1 gigabit per second for downloads and 400 Mbps for uploads.

“We showed a downlink video of 1.3 gigabits and above the 400 on the uplink, which is quite stunning,” Weber said. “So we feel really good on the design. The stability of it, the quality is job one for us as we’re putting that up.”

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

“That’s a lot of work we’ve been doing over the years that looks at lots of different external metrics and internal metrics,” he said. “The good news is, particularly on the government and business side, you get demand signals every day, and we’ve been talking to customers every day. … We get incredible signals in order to be able to forecast our demand by not only customer terminal, but what’s the service plan they would need, the speeds they would need on the downlink and uplink.”

Satellite synergies

Amazon is also fine-tuning its strategies for taking advantages of synergies between Leo and its other business lines, starting with Amazon Web Services.

“We’ve announced our private networking option via AWS, where if you’re a business or a government customer, you can go from your customer terminal to the antenna into your AWS data estate or computing estate or your own private data center without ever touching the internet,” Weber said. “That’s incredible value. And boy, does that resonate significantly with business and government customers.”

Regular consumers will see synergies as well, potentially involving Prime Video, Fire TV, Ring, Zoox and even Amazon delivery services. “Without announcing anything, I would say we’re very excited about bringing differentiated new value to our customers across the Amazon set of products and services,” Weber said.

Like SpaceX, Amazon Leo is nailing down deals for in-flight connectivity 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 on direct-to-device,” Weber said. “That’s been part of our strategy from the beginning, but it really starts to expand the use cases.”

Amazon is expected to follow through on Globalstar’s expansion plans and take them to the next level, but it won’t fold its direct-to-device service into Amazon Leo’s broadband offerings. The way Weber sees it, the direct-to-device market is different from the satellite broadband market, at least in the short to medium-long term.

“What direct-to-device does is open up brand-new scenarios where people simply don’t have connectivity today, and now you’re taking these billions of mobile handsets and making those connected so you can do voice messaging, those types of things,” he said. “The way I think about it is that they’re pieces of a puzzle and expanded use cases, with broadband and direct-to-device versus one replacing the other.”

Some connectivity customers may want both. “You could foresee something in the automobile where they want broadband coverage, but also the ability to have direct-to-device, which is lower speed but gives you broader connectivity,” Weber said.

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

“Well, I will tell you, we’ll be in service, and we’ll have a lot more satellites up, and so we’ll have broader geographic coverage,” he said. “The thing that I talk to our team about all the time, and it’s the thing we’re focused on, is building a service that customers love. That is job number one, two and three for us — because if we get that right, then as we expand, everything else can happen.”

As Weber said, Amazon Leo is likely to be available initially to customers in mid-northern and mid-southern latitudes. Internet users can plug their postal code and email address into an online form at Leo.Amazon.com to get updates on the project’s progress and availability in their area.

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