Ars: What about for regular consumers?
Weber: On the consumer side, I’d frame it in three areas. One is value, so I would think about that as price, performance, and other differentiators that we put in there. We’re going to take the Amazonian way and have by far the best value. Second thing would be ease of use, and I think there’s some really creative things we’re doing in terms of how customers acquire the service, get it installed, set it up, et cetera. That, I think, will be some real pleasers or pleasant surprises. And then I would say better together, and I won’t get into the details on this, but I would just say there are lots of assets within Amazon that we can pair with Leo to bring new value to consumers. So you could think about anything from Prime to Prime Video, eero routers and extenders, Fire TV, Ring, etc. And so there are lots of opportunities for us to bring new value to consumers in those three things.
Ars: A critic might say they’ve been hearing about Amazon Leo or Project Kuiper for a long time, and it doesn’t feel like we’re ever going to see this. What do you think the perception of Amazon Leo will be 12 months from now?
Weber: There’s someone already in the market. But more importantly, when we put the Amazon brand on that service, it means something. So we have a very high bar, and we know we not only have to launch a great service, it has to be differentiated across the customers we serve. And I think people will see that when we launch, and then as we get more and more coverage with satellites, we’ll expand the capability to portability, mobility, and then continue to bring new value to customers, whether it’s the consumer, business, and government.
Ars: Your first-generation constellation is going to have 3,232 satellites. What are your expansion plans beyond that?
Badyal: We start off with 3,232 satellites, and we expect to delight the customers with the speeds and the performance, the security, all things that Chris was talking about, including coverage. The first generation will do great at it, but as with any other constellation or service that you provide network, you continuously have to improve. You continuously have to add more capability, and we do have plans long-term to absolutely do a Gen 2. We have filed it with the FCC. We’re already in design phase of Gen 2 as we speak today. Obviously we can’t share the details of what we’re doing there. But you can expect for us to continue to delight the customers, to continue to make sure that our enterprise, government, as well as consumer customers see a step up in whatever we bring next to the table.