Starlink’s ambitious mobile plan could be trouble for Apple, AT&T, and Verizon

Summary

SpaceX holds spectrum licenses for the Starlink fixed Internet service for homes and businesses. Adding the EchoStar spectrum will make its holdings suitable for mobile service. "SpaceX currently holds no terrestrial spectrum authorizations and no license to use spectrum allocated on a primary basis to MSS," the company's FCC filing said. "Its only authorization to provide any form of mobile service is an authorization for secondary SCS [Supplemental Coverage from Space] operations in spectrum licensed to T-Mobile." Starlink unlikely to dethrone major carriers SpaceX's spectrum purchase doesn't make it likely that Starlink will become a fourth major carrier. Grand claims of that sort are "complete nonsense," wrote industry analyst Dean Bubley. "Apart from anything else, there's one very obvious physical obstacle: walls and roofs," he wrote. "Space-based wireless, even if it's at frequencies supported in normal smartphones, won't work properly indoors. And uplink from devices to satellites will be even worse." When you're indoors, "there's more attenuation of the signal," resulting in lower data rates, Farrar said. "You might not even get megabits per second indoors, unless you are going to go onto a home Starlink broadband network," he said. "You might only be able to get hundreds of kilobits per second in an obstructed area." The Mach33 analyst firm is more bullish than others regarding Starlink's potential cellular capabilities. "With AWS-4/H-block and V3 [satellites], Starlink DTC is no longer niche, it's a path to genuine MNO competition. Watch for retail mobile bundles, handset support, and urban hardware as the signals of that pivot," the firm said. Mach33's optimism is based in part on the expectation that SpaceX will make more deals. "DTC isn't just a coverage filler, it's a springboard. It enables alternative growth routes; M&A, spectrum deals, subleasing capacity in denser markets, or technical solutions like mini-towers that extend Starlink into neighborh...