Apr 13, 2026
The satellite internet service race is about to heat up.
In his annual letter (1) to shareholders this week, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon Leo, formerly known as Project Kuiper, will launch in mid-2026. That would put the retailer in direct competition with Elon Musk’s Starlink, which has been providing satellite-based internet access since 2020.
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Whether Leo will be immediately available to consumers at launch remains unclear. Jassy focused largely on the division’s enterprise and government customers in his letter.
Delta Airlines is the latest to sign on, committing to bring Leo service to 500 planes by 2028. Other commercial customers include JetBlue, AT&T, Vodafone and NASA.
Amazon said Leo will integrate seamlessly with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud platform, “to enable enterprises and governments to move data back and forth for storage, analytics and AI.”
Jassy added that consumer subscriptions remain a priority.
“We’re also trying to close the digital divide for rural communities,” he wrote. “If you don’t have broadband connectivity, you can’t engage in many of the digital activities (e.g. education, business, information retrieval, shopping, entertainment, etc.) that people take for granted in metropolitan locations.”
Building a network
Leo has launched more than 200 satellites over the past seven years, Jassy wrote. Thousands more are planned in the coming years to expand coverage.
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He also touted Leo’s performance, saying customers could expect uplink speeds six to eight times better than current options and download speeds about twice the current average. The Leo website says subscribers to the Ultra package could see download speeds of up to one gigabytes per second and uploads of 400 megabytes per second.
Jassy also said prices will be lower than competing services, an implied nod to Starlink without naming it directly.
Starlink’s download speeds typically range (2) between 45 and 280 megabytes. Monthly costs (3) typically range from $50 to $165 per month for personal service, with business plans reaching as high as $2,150.
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Strong competition
Despite the incentives Jassy listed, Leo may face an uphill battle against Starlink. The service has been operating since the first set of operational satellites launched in May 2019 and has more than 10,000 satellites (4) in orbit, dwarfing not only Leo but also other satellite internet providers, including France’s Eutelsat OneWeb, Canada’s Telesat Lightspeed and the EU-backed IRIS2.
It’s currently being used by more than 10 million people from rural regions, Ukrainian battlefields and deep in the Amazon rainforest. Amazon Leo remains in a private, pre-commercial preview phase.
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About Amazon (1); Starlink (2); Starlink (3); Scientific American (4)
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Chris Morris is a veteran journalist with more than 35 years of experience, the majority of which were spent with some of the Internet’s biggest sites, including CNNMoney.com, where he was director of content development, and Yahoo! Finance, where he was managing editor. His work has also appeared on Fortune, Fast Company, Inc., CNBC.com, AARP, Nasdaq.com, and Voice of America, as well as dozens of other national publications.
