SpaceX announced this week that it has acquired a portfolio of low-band spectrum licenses — a scarce and highly valuable resource in American telecommunications — and intends to use them to transform Starlink Mobile from a supplemental coverage service in underserved areas into a full-fledged mobile phone carrier. The company will compete directly with the three major U.S. wireless carriers: T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon.
The announcement came nearly two months after SpaceX's first earnings call since going public, held in August 2026, shortly after completing the largest IPO in history — $75 billion on the Nasdaq. During the call, President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said the company plans to launch its next-generation Starlink Mobile satellites in 2027 and begin offering an upgraded service by the end of that year. The new system would use the 65 megahertz of terrestrial spectrum SpaceX acquired from EchoStar in a $17 billion deal.
\"You could look at the Starlink Mobile leveraging this next-generation satellite and the EchoStar spectrum as being 100 times better than what we've got right now,\" Shotwell told investors, as reported by The Verge on October 8.
What makes this move different from previous satellite connectivity attempts is that SpaceX doesn't just want to fill coverage holes. It wants, explicitly, to capture customers from the big carriers. \"I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers because I think our service will be better,\" Shotwell said during the earnings call. Elon Musk added: the resulting network, combining satellites and smaller terrestrial stations, would offer \"better connectivity and higher bandwidth than what is currently available from cellular providers.\"
SpaceX's proposed architecture is ambitious. Currently, Starlink Mobile functions mainly as a safety net for terrestrial carriers — satellites act like cell towers in space, connecting phones when terrestrial signal is unavailable, whether in remote areas or during emergencies. In the United States, SpaceX's T-Mobile partner offers this service under the T-Satellite brand, which works as a supplemental layer to the regular 4G or 5G plan, not as a full replacement.
But SpaceX's new V2 generation of Starlink satellites — already approved by the FCC for 15,000 units in September 2025 — promises a qualitative shift. According to Michael Nicolls, SpaceX SVP, these satellites use a phased-array antenna five times larger than the first generation, with four times more bandwidth per beam. The link performance is 20 times superior to the previous generation, reaching speeds of up to 150 Mb/s. SpaceX intends to implement MIMO on the satellite, something that still doesn't exist in any commercial satellite service, and will follow the 3GPP Release-19 NR-NTN standard.
The decision to acquire terrestrial spectrum from EchoStar is not just a complement — it's what allows SpaceX to operate as a true hybrid carrier. \"With this new low-band spectrum and our Gen2 constellation, Starlink Mobile can now become the first network operator to deploy both satellite and terrestrial spectrum,\" the company said in its FCC filing.
The expansion isn't limited to satellites. Both Shotwell and Musk mentioned that SpaceX also plans to build a terrestrial network alongside the satellite system. The idea, according to Musk, would be to deploy \"lower-cost, smaller cellular base stations\" with Starlink dishes, eliminating the need for large cell towers in expensive and hard-to-reach locations. \"Instead of having to deploy these very expensive and difficult-to-locate, large cellular base stations, we feel reasonably confident that we can deploy a large number of small stations,\" Musk explained.
The financial context shows the company in full expansion mode. In Q2 2026, SpaceX revenue reached $7.8 billion — a 92% increase over the same period the previous year, when it was $4.1 billion. The Connectivity segment grew 66% in revenue and 79% in operating profit, driven by Starlink growth, which reached 12 million subscribers by June 30, 2026. Starlink's ARPU is $66 per month. Despite the record revenue, CAPEX exploded to more than $18 billion in the quarter, compared to $2.8 billion the same period last year.
The major carriers, naturally, are not pleased. AT&T and Verizon have already tried to delay the T-Mobile direct service at the FCC, arguing that the plan would harm their own mobile broadband networks. All three carriers combined generate approximately $600 billion in annual revenue — a market that SpaceX sees as ripe for the taking, as Advanced Television observed. T-Mobile, for its part, downplayed the risk: during its own earnings call in July, CEO Srini Gopalan stated that satellite service accounted for only 0.0003% of the carrier's network usage during the busiest months.
There's also the geopolitical and regulatory question. The EchoStar spectrum deal was approved by the FCC in May 2025, but SpaceX still needs authorizations in several international markets to operate. Partnerships have been announced with SoftBank and NTT DoCoMo in Japan, Spark in New Zealand, and other global carriers, but spectrum regulation in each country is a complex and lengthy process. SpaceX also needs to coordinate satellite operations in orbits below 400 km with NASA, ensuring protection of the International Space Station — a condition imposed by the FCC itself.
What makes SpaceX's play truly disruptive is that it's applying the same logic that made it dominant in launchers: extreme vertical integration plus economies of scale. The V2 satellites are manufactured in-house, launched by Starship (two successful tests in the last 90 days, according to the Q2 report), and the terrestrial infrastructure would be assembled from existing components — the Starlink dish, already widely distributed. If SpaceX delivers even half of what it promises, the telecommunications industry will have a new player with the potential to reconfigure a $600 billion sector in a few years.
The question is whether SpaceX's vertical integration model, which worked for rockets and satellites, will scale to the complex regulatory and competitive ecosystem of telecommunications. Or whether regulatory barriers and established carrier resistance will prevent the dream of a wholly new operator from materializing. The answer may define not only SpaceX's future, but the next decade of global telecommunications.
Sources: The Verge, CNBC, Via Satellite
✓ Independent sources cross-checked and verified before publishing
