Amazon's Project Kuiper Satellite Receivers Cost Less Than $400 to Make
Amazon says its Project Kuiper satellite broadband service has a day-one advantage over rival SpaceX’s Starlink, because its receiver hardware is so much cheaper to manufacture.
The company showed off images of Kuiper’s terminals in three sizes at the Satellite 2023 conference(Opens in a new window) in Washington, and in a blog post(Opens in a new window) said it expects to be able to manufacture the "standard" terminal for "less than $400 each." Amazon hasn’t yet stated how much the service will cost and if it will come with any limits on data usage.
That terminal, featuring a square antenna under 11-inches on a side and weighing under 5 pounds without its mounting bracket, will support maximum speeds of 400 megabits per second. That makes it smaller and lighter than Starlink’s current receiver, and unless Amazon sells this terminal at a huge markup, it should undercut Starlink’s $599 price–increased from $499 last year. SpaceX has said the price doesn’t yet cover its own manufacturing costs.
Kuiper will also offer a portable terminal, with a dish about 7-inches square and weighing 1 pound, with speeds maxing out at 100Mbps. There's also an enterprise-grade receiver with a 19-by-30-inch receiver supporting 1 gigabit per second speeds. Amazon’s announcement doesn’t get into production costs for either of those models, though.
For comparison, Starlink sells a $2,500 “high performance” receiver and has described plans to offer a laptop-sized receiver.
Amazon says all three Kuiper receivers and Kuiper’s satellites will run on an Amazon-designed chip called Prometheus, which in space will let each satellite handle up to a terabit per second of throughput. However, there is currently no Kuiper hardware in space.
The launch
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