What’s happened to Amazon Leo, the long heralded rival to Starlink?

Jeff Bezos has fired his wife into space, but he hasn’t yet managed to send up enough satellites to let Amazon Leo provide a long awaited rival to Starlink. What’s happened to Leo and is there any chance it’s going to start delivering satellite broadband anytime soon?

Here, we cover the reasons for the delays, the company’s enterprise plans, its important acquisition of Globalstar earlier this year, and the potential involvement of the US Government.

Satellite delay

Amazon kicked off Project Kuiper (as Leo was called then) seven years ago, with the aim of providing a rival to SpaceX’s Starlink. Starlink had been founded four years previously.

Say what you like about Elon Musk, but his company knows how to get satellites into space. Between 2018 and 2024, Starlink successfully launched more than 6,000 satellites, and just this week put its 11,000th satellite into Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

By comparison, Amazon Leo has only 396 satellites in orbit, and its ability to bolster that relatively low compliment has been hampered by launch mishaps.

In April, Blue Origin’s New Glenn launcher (Blue Origin being Bezos’s space company – a separate entity from Amazon) failed to deliver sufficient thrust to get satellite payloads to their required orbit. This forced Amazon to burn the satellites.

Then in May, one of New Glenn’s rockets exploded on the launchpad, mere days before it was scheduled to carry a fresh batch of Amazon satellites.

Blue Origin is building a replacement pad and relying on alternative launchers in the meantime, but it’s added further delay to the Amazon Leo project that was already running behind schedule.

Amazon was meant to have more than half of its allocated 3,236 satellites deployed by July and had to apply to the FCC for an extension. It was also scheduled to have launched commercial services by the middle of this year.

Soft launch of Amazon Leo Ultra for enterprises

Those commercial launches used Amazon Leo Ultra, shown in the video above. Aimed at enterprises and public sector organisations, this promises downloads speeds up to 1Gbit/sec and uploads of up to 400Mbits/sec.

This compares to downloads of up to 500Mbits/sec for Starlink’s business customers today, although it has promised up to 1Gbit/sec at some point in 2026. So roughly even. Things swing in Amazon’s favour for upload speeds, with Starlink stating typical uploads of between 10 and 30Mbit/sec currently.

Amazon started trials with enterprise customers last November, but now it’s expected to go live late this year or early next year.

Direct to mobile

There are other positive signs for Amazon Leo. This week, the FCC accepted its plan to launch up to 5,105 satellites to provide a direct-to-device service to mobile phones.

Amazon has bought itself something of a headstart here, having acquired the Globalstar satellite network in April 2026. Globalstar provides the SOS service to devices such as recent Apple iPhones, allowing them to contact emergency services when outside of cell reception.

Leo’s direct-to-device service aims to go far beyond emergency services, providing voice and high-speed data directly to smartphones, offering full-fat connectivity in places that aren’t served by 5G cell towers. As well as consumers, they will also be targeting governments, emergency services and IoT applications such as driverless cars. That service is estimated to go live in 2028.

Government intervention

Before Amazon Leo can launch its direct-to-device service, the FCC (the US comms regulator) wants to hear from rivals about the plan. And you can guarantee objections being slid across the table from Starlink and others.

Amazon and Starlink have issued tit-for-tat objections to each others’ plans for the past few years. However, the Musk-friendly Trump administration seemed to be losing patience with Amazon earlier this year, when the company objected to SpaceX’s ambitious plans to flood space with a million LEO satellites.

“I think Amazon should focus on getting Amazon’s house in order with their own launches and their own satellite constellation, rather than worrying about other people that are actually out there launching satellites at the pace and cadence that SpaceX is,” FCC chair Brendan Carr told Reuters in March. Ouch.

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