When Will Starlink Have LEO Competition in the Home Internet Market?

On April 28, Amazon’s Project Kuiper launched an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida and sent 27 satellites into low Earth orbit. The ground personnel rapidly established contact with the satellites. It was the first of a series of planned launches to an altitude of 280 miles, working toward a future constellation of 3,200 satellites beaming broadband service worldwide with extremely low latency. The hope is to give Starlink some competition. That sums up the state of the LEO-based broadband market today. Elon Musk’s Starlink has had the field to itself for years and continues to expand its constellation, which currently stands at 6,750 satellites. Project Kuiper and others have just begun launching satellites, but when will there be effective competition? Communications research firm Strand Consult compares competition between Project Kuiper and Starlink to a just-opened “burger bar” and an “interstellar McDonald’s.”