Drive far enough outside any major American city and you will find the same thing. Your phone signal drops. Text messages stop sending. Navigation goes blank. That gap in coverage has existed for decades, and the three biggest wireless carriers in the country have never fully closed it. SpaceX just said it plans to.
On August 4, during its first-ever earnings call as a public company, SpaceX outlined a plan to build a hybrid wireless network combining Starlink satellites with small ground-based cells. The goal is to compete directly with Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, starting in the places those carriers struggle most, Bloomberg reported.
What SpaceX is building with Starlink mobile wireless
Traditional wireless networks run on towers. Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile have built hundreds of thousands of them across the U.S. over three decades. Each tower covers a fixed area. Towers are expensive to build and maintain, which is why rural coverage has always lagged urban coverage.
SpaceX is taking a different approach. Instead of towers, SpaceX plans to use small cells mounted on the same hardware that already holds Starlink broadband dishes. Those dishes are installed on homes and businesses across the country.
CEO Elon Musk described the plan on the call:
“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. Essentially, they’re really just Starlink dishes that also provide connectivity in the mobile spectrum bands, and have them be all over the place.”
More SpaceX:
- Morgan Stanley says SpaceX investors miss the bigger story
- Peter Schiff says SpaceX is a warning for hyped stocks
- SpaceX stock defies latest Wall Street forecasts
The satellite layer is the other half. SpaceX already operates Starlink satellites that can reach phones directly in areas with no cellular signal. Next-generation Starlink Mobile V2 satellites, scheduled to begin launching in 2027, will have significantly more capacity.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the service will be “100 times better” than the current direct-to-device offering once those satellites and the EchoStar spectrum are deployed.
What customers would get from Starlink mobile vs the Big Three
Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile cover most Americans. Their networks run fast in cities and suburbs. Coverage maps show near-complete U.S. service. Rural roads, mountain areas, national parks, and open water are a different story. More than 500,000 square miles of the U.S. still lack cell coverage from any carrier, according to CNBC.
Starlink Mobile’s satellite component reaches those areas already. A phone connected through Starlink can send texts and access data in places where no tower signal exists.
SpaceX is now promising to go further. Musk claimed the combined satellite and small cell network would provide coverage that is “probably better and higher bandwidth than what is currently available from cellular providers.”
The question is whether that claim holds in practice. Dead zone coverage is one thing. Competing with Verizon or T-Mobile on speed, reliability, and capacity in a city or suburb is a different problem. Carriers have spent years building dense tower grids specifically because urban users generate the most traffic. SpaceX has not demonstrated it can match that density with small cells and satellite backhaul.
Pricing is also unresolved. The Big Three compete heavily on price through family plans, device trade-in offers, and promotional bundles. SpaceX has not disclosed what Starlink Mobile will cost when it launches as a standalone consumer product.
Kevin/Getty Images
How SpaceX plans to build mobile coverage without cell towers
SpaceX acquired 65 megahertz of spectrum from EchoStar. That spectrum is the foundation of the terrestrial plan. Starlink currently operates with roughly 5 megahertz through its T-Mobile partnership, which provides limited dead zone messaging and data. Adding the EchoStar spectrum would bring that total to approximately 70 megahertz.
During the earnings call Q&A, an investor asked Shotwell directly about competition with Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. She did not hedge her answer, CE-Sphere reported. “I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers because I think our service will be better,” Shotwell said. She cited a U.S. wireless market worth approximately $600 billion annually and said SpaceX intends to compete for a portion of it.
Shotwell also described the femtocell deployment model: “You could put a base station, a cellular base station on the gear that holds a Starlink broadband dish. So you can have kind of these little femtocells around the country, and you deploy that as you need it.”
What SpaceX needs to deliver in 2027 to compete with carriers
Starlink dishes are already on rooftops across the country. That gives SpaceX a physical platform for small cell deployment that traditional carriers do not have. Shotwell said SpaceX has ideas for building the ground network efficiently. She called them “great and new ideas” without going into specifics on the call.
The spectrum position is the biggest gap. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile each hold far more than SpaceX’s 65 megahertz. Spectrum determines capacity. SpaceX will need to win more in FCC auctions or find other paths to scale a nationwide network beyond rural and suburban coverage.
SpaceX also needs to build customer-facing infrastructure it does not have. Billing systems, retail channels, customer service operations, and device compatibility are all required before the company can take subscribers away from established carriers. The V2 satellite launches in 2027, the first consumer pricing announcement, and early customer numbers are the milestones that will show whether the plan can move from ambition to reality.
Related: Verizon hits a snag in attracting customers to a key service
