Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Photo: Amazon

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors that Amazon is planning to bring Project Kuiper into commercial beta service later this year or early next year, highlighting interest from enterprise and government customers. 

“We’re working very hard to get the satellites into space,” Jassy said Thursday. “We have some delays with some of the rocket providers, but we have most of the available rocket launches over the next couple of years. We’re very hopeful to get the service into commercial beta later this year or early next year.” 

Jassy talked about Kuiper on Amazon’s second quarter earnings call ahead of Kuiper’s upcoming mission. The launch is set for August 7 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It will be the second of three booked Project Kuiper missions with SpaceX. 

Without naming SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, Jassy said that as Kuiper is deployed, there will be “two players” with the modern technology in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. 

He said Kuiper will be differentiated in speed and the pricing will be “very compelling for customers.” Amazon has stated the standard customer terminal will deliver downlink speeds up to 400 Mbps and an enterprise model will deliver up to 1 gigabit per second. 

Jassy also called out Amazon’s relationships across Kuiper’s three customer segments of consumers, enterprises, and governments, and the cloud tie-in with Amazon Web Services (AWS). He said Kuiper has signed an “impressive” amount of agreements with enterprises and governments. 

“If you think about enterprises and governments, a lot of what they want to do when they take the data down from space is they want to put it into the cloud to do analysis, analytics, AI, and various operations on top of it. The fact that Project Kuiper and AWS are so seamlessly connected is very attractive to enterprises and to governments.”