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Amazon is moving forward, as planned, with its Leo satellite network after CEO Andy Jassy acknowledged in a letter to shareholders last week that the project had hit a major delay. During the retail giant’s earnings call on Wednesday, Jassy teased the global value of the low-Earth-orbit communications network when the commercial service launches, which he said would be “in a few months.”
Amazon Leo already has deals in place with companies, including Delta Airlines (which has committed half of its fleet to connect with the service in 2028), JetBlue, AT&T, Vodafone, DirecTV and NASA, and is positioning itself as a major competitor to Elon Musk’s Starlink service with ambitions to provide high-speed internet at an affordable price worldwide.
“It will be one of two offerings that are on the current technology edge, and I think that we will have a meaningful advantage in performance,” Jassy said during the call. “I think we’ll be about two times better on the downlink than existing alternatives, and about six times better on the uplink performance than existing alternatives.”
One could easily view this as a David versus Goliath matchup, considering Musk’s service has more than 10,000 SpaceX-connected satellites, while Leo will have roughly 250 in space once all satellite launches are complete.
It sounds like a numbers game, but according to an optimistic Jassy, Amazon’s acquisition of satellite network Globalstar is a massively important step in getting Leo off the ground (figuratively). The use of Globalstar’s system will “expand Leo’s satellite network with direct-to-device capabilities,” he said. Globalstar provides emergency satellite connectivity for the iPhone and Apple Watch, for texting emergency services, requesting roadside assistance, sharing locations, and messaging friends and families during natural disasters.
The name of the game here is connectivity, and, as Jassy pointed out during the call, there are still “billions of people around the world who do not have access to broadband.” If all goes according to plan, Amazon Leo will change that.
“There are many thousands of businesses and government assets that people don’t have visibility to because they don’t have the right connectivity. We think that Amazon Leo is going to solve that problem.”
Last week, Leo suffered another setback after Blue Origin’s New Glenn Mission 3 ended in a partial failure, when it delivered a satellite into the wrong orbit. Blue Origin, like Amazon, is owned by Jeff Bezos and was supposed to be delivering its first commercial payload for a customer, the BlueBird 7 communications satellite for AST SpaceMobile. Amazon didn’t address that failure and subsequent delay (the FAA has grounded the New Glenn vehicle from future missions while it conducts an investigation into the “mishap”) during the earnings call.
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