Amazon Leo, the retail giant’s competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink, has just built its 1,000th satellite for broadband internet. Amazon has been developing its own low-Earth-orbit satellite constellation to deliver broadband internet for most of the past decade, and the company is nearly ready to pull back the curtain.
SpaceX has been in this market for quite some time with Starlink, which is getting ready to launch a mobile carrier network. Amazon’s entry into this space is being closely watched, as some businesses have already signed on to Amazon Leo, including Delta Airlines, which plans to use Leo instead of Starlink (what almost every other airline uses for in-flight WiFi).
Amazon has tapped Rajeev Badyal, formerly at Starlink in its early years, to lead Leo, and he recently gave a wide-ranging interview about Leo to Ars Technica.
Badyal said Amazon had to overcome issues to produce satellites at scale. Badyal said that “building a couple of satellites is pretty straightforward, but building at scale is just exponentially harder. Our job was to design a satellite that is mass-producible.”
He was also asked about what Amazon Leo’s advantages are over Starlink, which Badyal mentioned that on the “business and government side, I’d say three distinct things. Performance is one, just our ability in terms of speeds, being able to deliver a gigabit on the downlink and 400 megabits on the uplink. By comparison, Starlink’s probably somewhere around 350 on the downlink, and somewhere around 40-ish on the uplink. So we have a 3x performance advantage on the downlink, and somewhere between eight and 10x on the uplink.”
Amazon Leo is expected to be available widely in the next year or so. Delta Airlines and a few other airlines are claiming they will have Amazon Leo for their in-flight WiFi by early 2028. That’s still far behind Starlink and other airlines like United and American.
The post Amazon Just Built Its 1,000th Leo Satellite, and It Says It Can Beat Starlink on Speed appeared first on Android Headlines.
