Amazon Eyes 2026 Entry to Satellite Internet Market Dominated by Musk’s Starlink
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 experienced a significant delay. During the retail giant’s earnings conference call Wednesday, Jassy discussed the global value of the low-Earth orbit communications network during the commercial service launch, which he said would happen “in a few months.”
Amazon Leo has already struck deals with companies including Delta Airlines (which has committed half its fleet to connect to 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 the ambition to provide affordable high-speed Internet access worldwide.
“This will be one of two cutting-edge offerings today, and I think we will have a significant performance advantage,” Jassy said on the call. “I think we’ll be about twice as good on the downlink as the existing alternatives, and about six times better on the uplink performance as the existing alternatives.”
One could easily view this as a clash between David and Goliath, given that Musk’s department has more than 10,000 Satellites connected to SpaceX, while Leo will have around 250 in space once all satellite launches are completed.
It sounds like a numbers game, but according to an optimistic Jassy, Amazon’s acquisition of the Globalstar satellite network is an extremely important step in getting Leo off the ground (figuratively speaking). Using 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 Watchto text emergency services, request roadside assistance, share locations, and message friends and family during natural disasters.
The watchword here is connectivity and, as Jassy pointed out on the call, there are still “billions of people around the world who don’t have access to broadband.” If everything goes as planned, Amazon Leo will change that.
“There are thousands of businesses and government assets that people don’t have visibility into because they don’t have the right connectivity. We believe Amazon Leo will solve this problem.”
Last week, Leo suffered another setback after Blue Origin’s New Glenn 3 mission ended in partial failure. placed a satellite in the wrong orbit. Blue Origin, like Amazon, is owned by Jeff Bezos and was supposed to deliver its first commercial payload to a customer, the BlueBird 7 communications satellite for AST SpaceMobile. Amazon did not address this failure and the resulting delay (the FAA has grounded the New Glenn vehicle for future missions while it conducts an investigation into the “accident”) during the earnings call.
