- Amazon will launch its first Kuiper satellite project on April 9
- They are the first step in their plan to offer a new satellite broadband service
- Project Kuiper will launch “later this year” to face Starlink
The new space race, where technological giants fight to offer us high -speed Internet from the low -earth orbit, is heating: Amazon has just announced that their first Kuiper satellite project will be launched next week to face Starlink.
The launch of 27 satellites, the first of around 3,200 that Amazon will extend to space, takes place at 12 pm et on April 9, which allows the weather. More important for anyone who is fixing their hopes in the satellite -based broadband that solves their dead areas, Amazon says that “we hope to start service to customers at the end of this year.”
Like Starlink satellites launched by Spacex, the Amazon system will be a worldwide service. The technological giant says that Project Kuiper “will offer high -speed internet and low latency to virtually any location on the planet.” He has not revealed how long it will have to obtain its 3,200 satellites of lowland orbit in space, but says that the process will imply 80 releases, and that its satellite internet will be available before the end of 2025.
Amazon sent two prototypes to space satellites in October 2023, but says that the new KA-01 models (or Kuiper Atlas 1) that are being thrown into an Atlas V rocket V next week are a “significant update” in those, with better antennas, processors and more. Apparently, they have also been covered in a single “dielectric mirror film” to make them less a visible monstrosity for earth -based astronomers.
How fast your broadband will be?
Amazon says that the broad objective of the Kuiper project is to “provide a quick and affordable broadband to communities around the world that are not currently attended by traditional Internet and Communications options.” That includes the developing world, but also regions of countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, where Amazon hopes to face Starlink offering affordable broadband to rural areas.
During the first days of the Kuiper project, you must obtain one of the three antennas or “terminals” (above) to connect to the orbit satellites of the Low Amazon Earth. The smallest model will apparently provide “up to 100mbps” speeds, with the average “up to 400 Mbps” option. The largest is designed for companies and government, and will deliver “up to 1 Gbps”.
Those “up to” classification are obviously important and we will have to wait until the end of this year to have an idea of real world speeds. Our Starlink review, for example, discovered that he gave us 71 Mbps discharge speeds (and 15 Mbps charges), which really fit into the 25-100mbps promised range.
Amazon has not yet announced the price of the Kuiper project, so far it only promised that “the affordability is a key principle of the Kuiper project” and compared its price strategy with that of its Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick. Later, we can expect Amazon to move towards a ‘direct’ service that connects its satellites with smartphones and tablets, but a release for that has not yet been confirmed.
For now, Amazon is looking to carry its first internet satellites in space, and everything that is fine, that will be the case at the end of next week.
