Ryan: Alex, what's going on with this Project Kuiper? Is this a real threat for Starlink?

Alex Gizis: Yeah, I think it might be. Project Kuiper is Amazon's new constellation of satellites for providing internet service.

Ryan: Do you mean Blue Origin?

Alex Gizis: I do not mean Blue Origin. It's not Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. It's Amazon. They are planning to launch their own satellites independently and they're thinking big.

We're talking more than 3,000 satellites providing internet service all over the world. It is a lot. Although, Starlink has over 6,000 now. Another interesting thing about it is that the Kuiper satellites are going to be about 500 kilometers up and the Starlink satellites are only 400 kilometers up, which means they're 20% further away from the Earth.

Which means each satellite can cover a bigger area because its signal spreads out further, but assuming everything else is the same as far as power and frequency and antenna design, that means 40% less power is going to make it to each antenna, assuming the antenna is the same size. Because it's 20% higher, but it's an inverse squared law for radio waves spreading out.

Ryan: Wait, so does that mean that Kuiper will have to have bigger antennas?

Alex Gizis: Yeah, so as I said, everything else being equal, they're going to get 40% less power down per area.

Now, an easy way to just cover for that is make your antenna 20% wider, 20% longer. That gets you back the 40% of the area you lost and you can get the same performance, right? So slightly bigger antennas can completely make up for your satellites being higher up.

Ryan: So what kind of speeds are they saying we'll get with Kuiper?

Alex Gizis: So they're saying they're going to have three tiers of performance. They're going to have an ultra compact model that can go up to 100 Mbps. They're going to have their standard model that can go 400 Mbps, and they're going to have some sort of larger enterprise antenna system that can get you up to 1 Gbps.

Ryan: How big do you think that's going to have to be?

Alex Gizis: I don't know. I'm betting it's not that large, although it could be, this kind of thing. I assume the ultra compact will be the only one you'll want to carry with you.

Ryan: Yeah, because if it's getting you 1 Gbps and the satellites are further away, it's probably bigger than your average...

Alex Gizis: You need a little bigger to get the extra speed and then a little bigger because it's so far away. And between all of them, you're probably looking at some kind of two pizza box set up.

Ryan: So you said they're higher altitude. Are they still considered low earth orbit?

Alex Gizis: Yeah, absolutely. 400 kilometers, 500 kilometers. Those are both low earth orbit. You get further out, the geosynchronous orbit, which is much further away, that like 35,000 kilometers. I mean, at that point, one satellite, his signal spreads out across really a third of the Earth. But that's where you end up needing these antennas that have these big dishes pointed right at the satellite.

We're talking about how these antennas work, right? So, the geosynchronous has this neat property that they're going around the Earth at the exact speed the Earth is turning, so it seems like they're not moving in the sky, so you can point the dish at them. When you point the dish at them, the actual active antenna is just a little thing right in the middle, and the dish is reflecting the signals so it hits the little antenna.

So, it's acting like a huge antenna, gathering signal across this big area and concentrating on your little antenna. But the way these Starlink and Kuiper antennas work is entirely different. They're actually MIMO. Multiple in, multiple out. Inside those dishes, it isn't one big antenna. It's like 64 little omnidirectional antennas set up in rows and columns.

And it uses complicated software to combine the signals of all of them to sort of emulate being a sort of dish like antenna pointed at the satellite as it moves by. And so by adjusting the properties in software as the satellite goes by, it can change where it listens to. And the way it does this, in the end, is that it, based on the direction it thinks the signal is coming from, so you have an antenna here, and the signal is down there, the software realizes, "well, if it's coming from there, it'll reach this end of the antenna first, And I'll reach this end of the antenna a fraction of a second later."

Because it's slightly further. Even though we're talking, hundreds of kilometers, it'll still take this much longer. And so it'll delay the signals from these antennas by this much, and the antennas on this stripe, it'll delay by the amount, light takes travel list.

And once it does those delays, then it adds them up. And so you get the signal as if this thing was a dish pointed right at it, and there's, a bunch of complicated math, but that's what it's doing. It's delaying the signals from the little antennas that are further away, and then you can just add up everything you got off all the antennas, and you get a stronger signal.

Ryan: Wow. That's pretty high tech.

Alex Gizis: It is. MIMO is kind of the new, new thing, and it made it into lots of things. Like, Wi-Fi routers have four or eight antennas sticking off them. They're doing MIMO. But, SpaceX takes it to another level, right? They don't have eight antennas. They actually have 64.

And I'm not sure that some of their new ones might have more than that. That's the big trick. I guess there are lots of tricks. Getting 6,000 satellites up in orbit is a bit of a trick. But the antennas, yeah, it's like 64 different antennas being combined together.

Ryan: So do you think these Kuiper satellites are going to work with Speedify?

Alex Gizis: Yeah, I think this is going to be awesome. So right now, a lot of people are using, Speedify with Starlink, and we support that great. We can add redundancy and error correction and combine it with cellular and get you better internet. And it'll work with Kuiper. You can do the exact same thing.

But what I'm really excited about is that you can have one computer connected to both. You use both constellations at the same time. Kuiper and Starlink. Kuiper and Starlink at the same time. And the reason I'm so excited about this is if you look at Starlink, there's a weird thing. Every 15 seconds, every Starlink dish in the world changes satellites.

And then 15 seconds later, everyone changes at the same time. They're synchronized. And the moment they switch satellites, there's a tiny moment where your internet goes out. You don't normally notice, although if you're in the middle of a live video call, there's a little glitch every 15 seconds.

Like a little bit of packet loss - one or three packets lost, and that's it, and then it recovers. But it's enough to be annoying to us. The Kuiper won't be synchronized. It'll be changing satellites sometimes too, but it won't be at the same time.

So you put the two together and we can go back and forth, whenever one hits an obstruction, whenever one's switching satellites, we'll put them together and I think we can really change how people think of satellite internet. I think we can hit these levels of reliability where it's just essentially perfect. And I'm really excited about that.

Ryan: So what's pricing going to be like for these Kuiper satellites?

Alex Gizis: They haven't announced actual pricing yet. What they have talked about is how affordability is a core value of Amazon and how that is going to be reflected in the pricing, driving down pricing for consumers.

So they haven't said pricing, they have telegraphed that their plan is to undercut Starlink. They plan to be the cheap, fast satellite internet service.

Ryan: Exciting times for the satellite internet consumer, maybe not necessarily for SpaceX.

Alex Gizis: I said exciting, not good.