Amazon Leo's satellite homework is late, but FCC won't flunk it just yet

NETWORKS

Orbital broadband biz will miss its July 30 deadline to have 1,616 spacecraft in place

Amazon is set to miss its deadline to deploy half of its Leo satellite constellation by July 30, as required by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The agency has, however, granted it a waiver of sorts – at the cost of priority status in spectrum licensing.

The Bezos-founded behemoth got the go-ahead from the FCC for what was then known as Project Kuiper back in 2020. This was on the proviso that it had 50 percent of its planned constellation of 3,236 broadband satellites in orbit by July 30, 2026.

Amazon rebranded its satellite broadband biz from Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo in November last year.

However, the company filed an application on January 30 this year seeking an extension of the deployment deadline by 24 months, or alternatively a complete waiver of this milestone requirement.

At the time of filing the application, Amazon Leo reported that it had launched just 180 satellites and estimated that it will have deployed approximately 700 by the July 30 deadline.

On June 5, the FCC granted Amazon a limited waiver of its 50 percent deployment requirement. However, the company is still expected to meet its final deployment deadline of July 30, 2029, for the entire constellation.

Under normal circumstances, if a licensee failed to meet the set interim milestone, its total number of authorized satellites would be capped at the number of satellites that were in orbit and operating on the date of the missed milestone. This will still apply if Amazon fails to have completed its deployment by the final deadline.

The FCC says in its order [PDF] that it may waive any rule for good cause shown, though this only tends to happen if such a move is judged to serve the public interest.

Amazon blamed delays from rocket launch providers and shortages of launch availability for causing significant backlogs and stretching out its planned deployment timelines. It also claimed that many of its planned launches were further delayed due to "a variety of factors that were outside of its control," including weather, technical problems, and prioritization of government launches.

The company is understood to have given the FCC assurances of its ability to meet an extended 50 percent milestone, as well as the final milestone in 2029, providing detailed schedules of future launches along with information on its financial and operational investments in the constellation and its mitigation efforts so far.

As a condition of the waiver, Amazon Leo is temporarily losing its priority status for any satellites that are not deployed and operational as of July 30, 2026, as initially authorized in the 2020 Ku/Ka-band Processing Round and in the 2021 V-band Processing Round, the FCC says, and will be reassigned to a later priority status.

"Priority status" governs a company's legal right to transmit in a specific orbital slot or frequency block.

This ruling means that Amazon Leo satellites deployed after July 30, 2026 will lose their priority access to the Ka/Ku spectrum until either 20 months have passed from that date (to March 30, 2028), or the date Amazon Leo manages to deploy and operate 50 percent of its constellation, whichever comes first.

We also understand that Amazon will forfeit the surety bond it agreed to post as a condition of its authorization for satellite launches. The amount involved was not disclosed.

The FCC notes that "a number of parties" filed comments in response to Amazon Leo's application, many of which support granting either the requested extension or waiver. However, Elon Musk's SpaceX filed comments opposing the granting of a waiver.

This is hardly surprising as Amazon Leo is a direct rival for SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband service. Back in March, Amazon also tried to get the FCC to reject a SpaceX application for permission to launch a fleet of orbital datacenter satellites. ®