Amazon Kuiper Overtakes Starlink: Satellite Internet Breaks the Gigabit Barrier
For years, Starlink sat on the satellite internet throne with no real challengers in sight. That era is ending. Amazon’s Kuiper project has just shattered the 1-gigabit mark from low Earth orbit, rewriting expectations for orbital broadband and setting the stage for a fierce new rivalry.
Until now, no commercial satellite network had managed to push past gigabit speeds in real-world testing. Amazon has changed that. Using a dedicated enterprise terminal, Kuiper achieved a download speed of 1,289 Mbps, the first time a low Earth orbit satellite service has crossed that threshold with a phased-array antenna.
Project lead Rajeev Badyal calls it a breakthrough moment: the first commercially oriented system to breach the gigabit barrier. While the hardware used in testing is not yet available on the open market, Amazon says its consumer-grade terminals already deliver up to 400 Mbps, placing them squarely in competition with Starlink’s existing offerings.
At present, Amazon has more than a hundred Kuiper satellites in orbit, with additional launches scheduled over the coming months. According to Badyal, the focus is now on scaling the network to handle rapidly growing volumes of both upstream and downstream traffic as more satellites come online.
For the moment, Kuiper enjoys what could be called the luxury of an empty network. With no paying customers yet crowding the system, available bandwidth is unencumbered. But, as Professor Jianping Pan of the University of British Columbia points out, the picture changes dramatically in real-world deployment. When millions of concurrent connections begin to share the same network, peak speeds inevitably compress.
Starlink is hardly standing still. SpaceX has already introduced a new business antenna priced at 1,999 dollars with throughput above 400 Mbps, and its V3 satellites—slated to join the constellation next year—are designed to deliver gigabit-class speeds of their own.
Kuiper is not open to consumers yet, but the project has already secured federal backing in the United States to expand broadband to rural and underserved communities. Demonstrations in Wyoming, for example, have shown stable speeds of at least 150 Mbps, a lifeline for regions long left off the digital map.
For now, Amazon holds the crown in raw speed, an achievement that signals a changing of the guard in satellite connectivity. The bigger question is whether those record numbers will hold once real-world demand arrives. Until then, the bragging rights belong to Kuiper.
