Starlink to become mobile phone company — SpaceX deal to acquire spectrum license — hammers shares of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile
- SpaceX announced an agreement on Thursday to purchase a nationwide spectrum portfolio as it pushes its Starlink service deeper into the U.S. telecommunications market.
- Shares of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile tumbled in extended trading.
- In a post on X, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk called the agreement a “very big deal.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/08/spacex-spectrum-license-att-verizon-tmobile.html?
So Internet via satellite and now potentially phones via satellite (guessing) — I’d switch if the “price is right”!
A related anecdote – our telco CenturyLink is cutting off all copper-pair service in my mid-sized metro area. We went with Starlink’s 100mbps service at $55/mo and 1-VOIP for my phone svc ($14/mo). So far so good. Also, FWIW avoid ADT if you don’t like getting your rates jacked twice a year and nearly 100% AI cust. service.
“Last Critical Piece”: SpaceX Secures Spectrum Deal To Challenge Big Telecom
“… high-speed service directly to unmodified devices anywhere in the world.”
Musk wrote on X that the low-band spectrum represents “the last critical piece of the spectrum puzzle needed for SpaceX to provide complete phone coverage in America.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/last-critical-piece-spacex-secures-spectrum-deal-challenge-big-telecom
https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2108336440069206234
We are about to witness one of the biggest disruptions in the history of the telecom and internet industry.
For decades, telecom and internet giants have dominated the industry with limited competition, slow innovation, and increasingly mediocre service.
SpaceX, $SPCX , is about to change that.
This is a clear wake up call to the current giants of the industry.
Evolve or you will be left behind.
800 band is below where the original RBOC analog cellular service was offered, via the 25MHz A and B slots.
Its great for propagation over distances and through walls. But it led to heavy RF exposure by your ear since they had to power up the phones to reach the distant towers.
Around 2000, when Voicestream came out (now T Mobile) with digital phones, they were at 1900 MHz.
Less power needed.
But 14 MHz isn’t alot, unless newer tech can magnify the capacity out of that.
And how do they power the phones to reach the LEO sats without repeating to radiation exposure issue?
My question is how do they
https://x.com/aakashgupta/status/2108464230278299930
T-Mobile spent five years trying to get rid of the exact spectrum Elon just called “the last critical piece” of complete phone coverage in America.
This 800 MHz block is Sprint’s old Nextel spectrum, the stuff that powered push-to-talk walkie-talkie phones in 2004. The DOJ forced T-Mobile to divest it as a condition of the $26 billion Sprint merger. Dish had first rights at $3.59 billion and walked away because it couldn’t raise the money. T-Mobile finally offloaded it to an investment firm called Grain Management last year for $2.9 billion plus a spectrum swap.
Grain’s original plan was selling it to utilities for private networks.
Fourteen months later, SpaceX buys the whole portfolio, and shares of the carriers who passed on it fall as much as 8% in a single afternoon.
Here’s why it matters so much. Starlink’s satellite signal at 2 GHz can reach your phone outdoors, but it dies at the first wall. 800 MHz penetrates buildings. Most phones already have the band built in. So satellites handle the open sky, this low-band layer handles indoors, and suddenly Starlink Mobile covers everywhere a normal carrier does without the tower network.
BUT
Andrew LaMarche
@andrewjlamarche
•
4h
The two problems are 1. 14MHz is really only enough for data rates in the low, maybe 10s of mbit/s. And 2. 800MHz can allow wall penetration from a high-power transmitter (e.g. satellite), but the limiting factor is cell phones are not and would drain the battery if they were.
Tokeinho
@tokeinho
Such a wrong statement. Starlink will actually need to use many broadcast towers to have a chance to become competitive. First, Starlinks’s plan using little dishes is complete non sense. Second, you need high towers to utilize the 800 MHz well, please study the RF characteristic
Lightm??n
@IronBeegle
•
4h
WADR, You’re way over simplifying this. With this acquisition, SX has ~1/30th of the spectrum that the other three have. It’s a drop in the bucket. And Gen2 satellites can’t even deploy the spectrum. It will require a completely different build/design to deploy via satellite.
Jason Buster
@realjasonbuster
•
1h
This explains why they partnered or wanted to partner with T-Mobile. That was what 1-2 years ago?