Amazon's CEO vows the company's answer to Elon Musk’s satellite internet service will be up and running by the middle of the year

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.

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.