Amazon shares a peek at satellite antennae for future Kuiper internet customers

Amazon’s low-orbit satellite internet company, Project Kuiper, hopes to rival Starlink in the coming years.

This week, Amazon debuted the customer terminals, or satellite dishes, that they hope will bring Kuiper into homes worldwide.

“Project Kuiper expects to launch the first production satellites in the first half of 2024 and plans to give its earliest customers access to the service beginning later that year,” according to their March 14, 2023 press release.

Compactly-designed antennae

The terminals will come in three sizes and versions: residential, portable and a larger one designed for enterprise, business and government uses. With an expected and relatively low starting production cost of under $400, if Amazon can pass that cost to consumers, their equipment costs could be less than Starlink’s fees, now at $599.

Amazon wanted to design something that was less unwieldy than current satellite antennae. The standard terminal is under 11″ and is 1″ thick, according to Amazon. “It weighs less than five pounds without its mounting bracket. Despite this modest footprint, the device will be one of the most powerful commercially available customer terminals of its size, delivering speeds up to 400 megabits per second (Mbps).”

The portable version can produce speeds up to 100 Mbps, while the industrial version will deliver speeds up to 1 Gbps.

Starlink’s service produces speeds up to 200 Mbps.

Project Kuiper plans

Amazon says that Kuiper will deploy over 3,200 low-orbit satellites in the coming years to ultimately serve “tens of millions of customers.” After an initial delay, they hope to have a test launch in the first quarter of 2023.

Learn more about the latest player in the satellite internet field:

Satellite internet

Amazon hopes to join the ranks of HughesNet, Viasat and Starlink in the satellite internet provider field.

Traditional satellite internet is typically the best rural source of connectivity, but it is known for being fairly slow at 25 Mbps. The game-changing aspect of Starlink and Kuiper is that their low-orbit satellite array can deliver speeds up to 400 Mbps and, ultimately, up to fiber internet speeds of 1 gig. Right now, Starlink is up to 200 Mbps.