Canadians in remote or underserved regions of the country will soon have a new option for satellite-based internet, Amazon’s Project Kuiper.
At the World Space Business Week conference Ricky Freeman, Amazon’s President of Kuiper Government Services, said Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite based internet service will be coming to Canada and several other countries in early 2026.
Considering how Canadians will soon be potentially benefiting from this service, it’s useful to look at exactly what Amazon Kuiper is, how it’s developing, and how it compares to other satellite-based internet service providers.
While there are details still to be released—like the price of Kuiper, the regional availability, and the details for how Canadians will be signing up for the service—there’s still a significant amount of information on what’s going on with the constellation and the service that Amazon will be providing to Canadians. It’s worthwhile to take a look, and see how it might compare to other options Canadians are taking advantage of.
The Kuiper constellation
The broad strokes of Amazon’s move into satellite based internet service provision are somewhat familiar. Kuiper Systems LLC (aka Project Kuiper) was established as a subsidiary of Amazon in 2019, intended to deploy a large constellation of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites that would be used to provide terrestrial connectivity in places with little-to-no existing internet access.
This is very similar to SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service, and the president of Kuiper Systems (Rajeev Badyal) was originally the Vice President of Starlink. Unlike with Starlink, however, Kuiper is not connected with any one launch company: while Amazon and Blue Origin were both founded by Jeff Bezos, there is no official connection between Kuiper and Blue Origin, and Kuiper satellites have been launched by—and will continue to be launched by—several different providers, including SpaceX themselves.
Current and future launch vehicles for the Kuiper constellation include SpaceX’s Falcon 9, ULA’s Atlas V and Vulcan Centaur, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, and Arianespace’s Ariane 6.
The first-generation Kuiper constellation was intended to employ 3,236 satellites in LEO, and according to their FCC license, they are required to launch 50% of their satellites by July 30th, 2026. A second constellation of an additional 3,200 next-generation satellites would follow.
Launches are now ongoing, including a successful ULA Atlas V launch on September 25th that carried 27 Kuiper satellites into orbit. Freeman told delegates at the WSBW talk that another launch would be happening in October, and that Amazon would have more than 200 satellites in orbit by the end of year. But most of the launch vehicles that Kuiper was going to rely on have suffered from delays, affecting Kuiper’s launch cadence.
Freeman said that launch was a challenge, and why the constellation was “not exactly where we wanted to be.” He admitted that “I need more launch” and told the crowd “if you have a slingshot, I’d probably buy it right about now.” The company already filed to reduce the size of the constellation slightly, down to 7,736 in total. It will likely need to further negotiate with the FCC over some kind of extension, as hitting that mid-2026 deadline seems to be extremely unlikely.
Nevertheless, this preliminary constellation will be enough for Kuiper to start offering service in a few key regions, including much of Canada. Freeman said that five countries would have continuous coverage by Kuiper’s satellites “by the end of Q1 2026:” Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
By the end of 2026, Freeman said that Kuiper “will be in approximately 26 countries,” and will incorporate “our land and maritime mobility services.” In 2027 they will expand to the equator and to aerial services, and in 2028 they will be in “88 to 100 countries” with pole-to-pole coverage. All of these depend on a consistent launch schedule, however; and as Freeman said, launch is a concern.
Freeman said that the first-generation Kuiper satellites, however, are working fine. “We have established the optical inter-satellite link connections at about a hundred gigabits per second,” he said, adding that “it took about four seconds” to establish the sat-to-sat links. “We’ve run a number of tests” on the satellites’ connections to terrestrial terminals, with “max rates [for] download speeds of at max 1.8 gigabits per second.”
Kuiper terminals and their capabilities
Those are impressive download speeds in tests, but what can Canadians expect when they sign up for Kuiper sometime next year? Many questions are still up in the air, such as pricing, resistance to congestion, and regional availability. But Amazon has already given us some information about the kinds of terrestrial connections that Canadians can expect to be able to get from Amazon’s new service, and the general nature of the uplink terminals they’ll be using.
According to Amazon, there are three general models that they’ll be using for customer terminals: one for general residential customers, one for commercial and governmental customers, and one “ultra-compact” design for portability.
Kuiper’s ultra-compact terminal is slated to be “Project Kuiper’s smallest and most affordable customer terminal.” The 7-inch square terminal will weigh “just one pound,” according to Amazon, and offer speeds of up to 100 megabits per second. The small terminals are intended to “connect residential customers who need an even lower-cost model, as well as government and enterprise customers pursuing applications like ground mobility and internet of things (IoT).”
Kuiper’s standard residential and small business terminal is somewhat larger and weightier. The terminal “measures less than 11 inches square and 1 inch think,” according to Amazon, and “weighs less than five pounds without its mounting bracket.” This larger-sized terminal will also have more powerful capabilities, Amazon said, “delivering speeds of up to 400 megabits per second.” Amazon said that these standard-size terminals will be produced “for less than $400 each”, though how that production cost will be reflected in the cost to customers remains unclear.
Finally, Kuiper’s high-bandwidth terminal “for the most demanding needs” is, Amazon said, “designed for enterprise, government, and telecommunications applications that require even more bandwidth.” It has a top speed of 1 gigabit per second—comparable to current fiber-optic connections offered by Canadian ISPs—and measures 19 inches by 30 inches. This is, presumably, the connection that will be used for their maritime and aerial service, though Amazon didn’t provide specifics on that.
In all these cases, the terminals use a baseband chip that has the Amazon code name “Prometheus.” Amazon said that the chip combines “the processing power of a 5G modem chip found in modern smartphones, the capability of a cellular base station to handle traffic from thousands of customers at once, and the ability of a microwave backhaul antenna to support powerful point-to-point connections.” Amazon said that this same kind of chip will be used in both the satellites and ground gateway stations, “allowing the system to process up to 1 terabit per second (Tbps) of traffic on board each satellite.”
Each of these terminals also use Ka-band phased-array antennas which overlay the terminal’s transmit and receive antennas. David Limp, senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon, said in 2020 that is possible owing to “an inherent asymmetry of how people use broadband, in that they receive much more than they send,” which meant that Kuiper’s designers could “overlay Rx and Tx — receive and send — in the same lattice.”
Comparable services
So how does this compare to LEO competitors like Starlink and Eutelsat OneWeb?
According to Starlink’s specifications, “Starlink users typically experience download speeds between 25 and 220 Mbps with a majority of users experiencing speeds over 100 Mbps. Upload speeds are typically between 5 and 20 Mbps.” This echoes the recent experience of Jon Martindale at PCWorld, who said that “I’ve yet to see [my upload speeds] break 30 Mbps. More often than not, it’s closer to 15 Mbps”.
Leaving aside the upload speeds—Kuiper hasn’t provided any numbers for that and the “overlay” may drastically affect it—these are definitely lower download speeds than Kuiper claims for everything but its ultra-portable terminal. But part of the variation is due to saturation, where there’s simply too many users in a small area for the available satellites to handle. If Kuiper’s satellites become oversaturated, which may be very possible considering the currently-small constellation, the available bandwidth and speed may drop dramatically.
(The mounting position of the terminal may also have a big impact; Martindale saw his Starlink download speeds jump by 4X by mounting the terminal by his roof.)
As for the price of Starlink, the standard terminal currently costs $119 CAD (down from $499). The monthly cost depends on a number of factors; a fixed-location “residential” plan costs $140 a month, and a lower-priority “residential lite” plan costs $110 a month. A “roam” plan that lets users move around costs $189 a month, or $70 a month for a plan that’s limited to 50GB of data a month.
Business plans also vary. Fixed-location “local priority” plans vary from $94-$778 a month, depending on the amount of data needed per month. “Global priority” plans, which Starlink describes as “best for maritime and global connectivity”, range from $365 to $3,120 a month—again based on the amount of data usage.
It seems reasonable to assume that Kuiper will be comparable in its offerings at the very least.
With Eutelsat OneWeb, most customers don’t get the service directly from the company Instead, Eutelsat primarily works with Canadian Internet Service Providers like Northwestel and Galaxy Broadband, as well as with enterprise customers and with Federal and Provincial governmental agencies through an arrangement with Shared Services Canada. That makes one-to-one comparisons difficult.
Nevertheless, the datasheets for the Intellian terminals do provide projected speeds; the smaller 22” by 18” OW10HL fixed terminal has a peak download of 75 megabits per second and peak upload of 14 megabits, while the larger 38” by 20” OW11HL fixed terminal has download and upload peaks of 195 Mbps and 32 Mbps respectively.
These are comparable to the Kuiper speeds, but in somewhat larger packages. Still, considering how Kuiper will not be “pole to pole” until at least 2027, it’s worth considering as an alternative to Starlink if an ISP offers it.
The upcoming Telesat Lightspeed constellation should soon become a factor too with launches beginning in late 2026.