- Amazon launches its first Kuiper satellite project on April 9
- They are the first step in its plan to offer a new large satellite service
- Project Kuiper will launch “later this year” to face Starlink
The new space race, where technological giants are fighting to offer us the high -speed internet of low orbit, warm up – Amazon has just announced that its first Kuiper satellite project will be launched next week to face Starlink.
The launch of 27 satellites – the first of 3,200 years that Amazon will explode in space – should take place at 12 noon on April 9, if time allows. Most importantly for anyone pinning its hopes on the wide strip by satellite resolving their dead areas, Amazon says “We plan to start service to customers later this year”.
Like Starlink satellites launched by SpaceX, the Amazon system will be a global service. The technology giant claims that the Kuiper project “will provide Internet broadband and low latency to almost any location on the planet”. He has not revealed how long it will take to put in space his 3,200 satellites in low terrestrial orbit, but indicates that the process will involve 80 launches – and that his satellite internet will be available before the end of 2025.
Amazon sent two prototype satellites in space in October 2023, but says that the new Ka-01 models (or Kuiper Atlas 1) which are launching on an Atlas V rocket next week are a “significant upgrade” on those, with better antennas, processors and more. They were also covered with a “dielectric mirror film” unique to make them less visible for earth -based astronomers.
How fast will your broadband be?
Amazon says that the large objective of the Kuiper project is to “provide high and affordable high speed to communities around the world which are not currently served by traditional Internet and communication options”. This includes the developing world but also the regions of countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, where Amazon hopes to face Starlink by offering an affordable high speed to rural areas.
During the first days of Project Kuiper, you will have to get one of the three antennas or “terminals” (above) to connect to the Amazon low orbit satellites. The smallest model will apparently provide “up to 100 Mbps” speeds, the average option up to 400 Mbps “. The largest is designed for businesses and the government, and will deliver “up to 1 Gbit / s”.
These qualifications “up to” are obviously important and we will have to wait later this year to have an idea of real speeds. Our Revue Starlink, for example, revealed that it gave us 71 Mbps download speeds (and 15 Mbps downloads), which is part of the promised range of 25-100 Mbps.
Amazon has not yet announced the price of the Kuiper project, so far, only promising that “affordability is a key principle of the Kuiper project” and compared its pricing strategy to that of its Echo Dot and Fire TV stick. Further on, we can expect that Amazon moves to a “direct on disk” service which connects its satellites to smartphones and tablets, but a launch has not yet been confirmed.
For the moment, Amazon seeks to put its first Internet satellites in space – and all that is good, this will be the case by the end of next week.
