Amazon's Project Kuiper

A look at Amazon's planned LEO broadband service.

Amazon announced that it has reached agreements with commercial space companies to launch Amazon's Project Kuiper's low earth orbit (LEO) satellites designed to deliver broadband to unserved areas. The announcement, and Project Kuiper in general, have me scratching my head. 

The announcement of agreements with two space companies, in addition to Jeff Bezo's Blue Origin, seem to be a confirmation that Blue Origin is nowhere near as capable as Elon Musk's SpaceX, which is launching all their Starlink LEO satellites without outside assistance. And speaking of satellites, Project Kuiper plans to eventually have 3,236 total LEO satellites. Starlink already has over 2,000 satellites in service with about another 10,000 planned for the future. Just the sheer number of satellites seems logically to point to Starlink as the more robust and thus reliable of the two services. 

Amazon seems to be counting on price to be their big advantage and with their experience building Kindle's and Echo's perhaps that will be true on the receivers needed for the service but what of the service itself? Starlink recently had to raise their service price to $110/month due to inflation and the increase across the board of the cost of goods. In Amazon's video (which was pretty much all sizzle and no steak) there were people complaining about paying $70 and $80 for Internet. Don't see that as being coincidental. 

My guess is that Amazon may be planning on bundling Project Kuiper service with Amazon Prime. Say a customer signs up for Amazon Prime and they get Kuiper service for $55 / month? Makes sense since a person can't shop online unless they have reliable Internet. That could also potentially make Kuiper more attractive than Starlink. As a stand-alone service it may be a loss-leader but overall with all the new revenue coming in for Amazon from these rural customers it may be a boost to the company’s bottom line.

Also have a suspicion that Project Kuiper may be fulfilling an internal need for Amazon's own business units - which would explain the planned much smaller satellite constellation footprint than Starlink's. Just as AWS (Amazon Web Services) was an offshoot of Amazon's own internal hosting needs - Project Kuiper may be also first and foremost be an internal Amazon solution to an existing Amazon issue. 

Amazon Prime Video is nowhere as good a streaming service as Netflix but because it is bundled with Amazon Prime (free to Prime subscribers) many people have it and use the service. Maybe this will be true of the Project Kuiper vs Starlink dynamic as well.