Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has just announced a satellite internet network called TeraWave which will be capable of offering data speeds up to 6Tbps, and geared towards enterprise, data center, and government customers.
The TeraWave constellation will use a mix of 5,280 satellites in low-Earth orbit and 128 in medium-Earth orbit, and Blue Origin plans to deploy the first ones in late 2027. It’s not immediately clear how long Blue Origin expects it will take to build out the whole network.
The low-Earth orbit satellites Blue Origin is building will use RF connectivity and have a max data transfer speed of of 144 Gbps, while the medium-Earth variety will use an optical link that can achieve the much higher 6Tbps speed. For reference, SpaceX’s Starlink currently maxes out at 400 Mbps — though it plans to launch upgraded satellites that will offer 1 Gbps data transfer in the future.
“TeraWave adds a space-based layer to your existing network infrastructure, providing connectivity to locations unreachable by traditional methods,” the new website for the satellite network reads.
The announcement of the TeraWave network comes just a few months after Bezos’ other company, Amazon, announced a rebrand of its own satellite network geared toward consumers. That network, called Leo, will ultimately consist of around 3,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit and offers more traditional broadband speeds.
Taken together, these two networks could provide more robust competition to SpaceX’s Starlink, which has become the leading satellite internet provider with more than 9 million customers. Starlink currently sells its connectivity to regular consumers, commercial customers (like airlines), and governments.
That said, the two networks from Amazon and Blue Origin are distinct.
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“We identified an unmet need with customers who were seeking enterprise-grade internet access with higher speeds, symmetrical upload/download speeds, more redundancy, and rapid scalability for their networks. TeraWave solves for these problems,” Blue Origin said in a statement to TechCrunch.
Blue Origin has spent years in development on a number of projects, and is best-known for the short trips to space it offers on its small New Shepard rocket.
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