First Look at Amazon Leo’s WiFi Router for its Satellite Broadband Service
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has published new documents that give us our first look at the E1 router (L1LA10) that Amazon Leo (Project Kuiper) intends to ship alongside its service, which reflects a huge constellation of ultrafast broadband satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) – available to the UK and globally.
The service, which will be available to consumers, businesses and the public sector, is currently still in its commercial beta phase and will start to launch properly through 2026 and 2027. Amazon Leo currently has approval to deploy and operate their own initial constellation of 3,236 LEO broadband satellites (altitudes of between 590km to 630km). A total of c.300 Kuiper satellites have already been placed into orbit (they need at least 500 for basic global coverage) and many more are due to follow.
At present we already know what the terminals (dish) will look like for the new service (here) and consumers can expect broadband download speeds of up to between 100Mbps (Nano dish) to 400Mbps (Pro dish). But until now nothing has been known about the wireless router they intend to ship alongside.
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The good news is that a confidentiality period recently expired on Amazon’s related regulatory filings with the FCC (credits PC Mag), which has given us our first good look at the router hardware they’ll be shipping. The documents show a square-ish shaped white coloured device with rounded edges (16cm wide and 17cm long), called E1 and model code L1LA10.
The router, which supports Wi-Fi 6 and a mesh mode, has just three ports on the back – one for power, one for Ethernet (LAN – RJ45) and another Ethernet connector that’s specifically for dish connectivity. The device also appears to ship with a LINE TEK power cable and a lengthy Luxshare Ethernet cable, which is listed as being Cat 5e (an older standard but enough to handle the speeds of Amazon’s service).
In addition, the router is said to support both the Bluetooth Low Energy and the ZigBee wireless protocols. The FCC submission also includes some internal pictures, which show it’s powered by Qualcomm’s Wi-Fi chips (QCN 6112, IPQ5018, and QCA8061), along with what looks like 4GB of flash memory from SkyHigh.
Given the size of this device, it’s likely to only ship alongside their Nano or Pro terminals, with enterprise customers (Ultra dish) probably needing something more powerful. Hopefully Amazon will release something more official soon.
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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That’s an exciting piece of product design! I can see they spent months coming up with a square white box with some sockets on the back.
And if you hang it on the wall with the cables down the E1 is upside down!
MissTuned:
Yes but they are designer sockets
Well isn’t this exciting!
Does this not need a dish like starlink?
What’s the first bet that users will still complain about poor WIFI in their 4 bed detached homes.
Also, is there some news about these LEOs being detrimental to the Ozone layer?
Oh well!
Considering: “The router, which supports Wi-Fi 6 and a mesh mode, has just three ports on the back – one for power, one for Ethernet (LAN – RJ45) and another Ethernet connector that’s specifically for dish connectivity.”
It does need a dish like Starlink. Also it looks like it does support “mesh”, which means you will be able to pair it with probably Eero.
Clicking the link in the article shows pictures of very boring white square or rectangle dishes.
The smallest seems to be about the same size as the E1 router pictured in this post, there is one that is maybe 50% larger, and a huge rectangle plate option.
Inside I suspect a chunky phased array antenna and boards with RF electronics (transciever modem) and computing power, perhaps acting in a way somewhat analogous to a FTTP ONT in that the signal processing and transcoding is done in the antenna, with the cable providing power, digital control signals and data, and the modem/router not having to do very much beyond being a Wifi Router with a power supply.
Similar architectural split as the Three 5G solution that offers an external antenna (which is actually a transciever modem).
For best service likely to need to be mounted externally, certainly with some visibility to the sky.
Slightly disappointing to see only 1 Lan port but at least it does include the one as standard unlike previous Starlink routers for those of us who prefer to use hardwired/WAP network.
seems to be an Amazon thing as the eero routers that I have had, only have a wan and lan port on them
A pity there’s not more ethernet ports but I suspect the majority of home users only ever use WiFi anyway.
One is fine. If it had four LAN Ethernet ports instead of one it would be a bigger “square white box with some sockets” and I’d still need a switch. So I’m happy with just one Ethernet port and my fully occupied 5-port switch (currently connected to a Nokia Beacon 2 for FWA… which I’m hoping to swap out to the E1 when/if the Leo service becomes operational).