Musk Says Starlink Mobile Will Be '100 Times Better'

HAWTHORNE, Calif. — SpaceX is preparing to turn Starlink into a serious challenger to the biggest names in wireless. On the company's first earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said a next-generation Starlink Mobile network could be "100 times better" than today's service — and good enough to win over "quite a few" customers from AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.

Musk's math was simple. "We have 65 MHz of bandwidth available to us through the EchoStar spectrum, which gives a massive increase in capability," he said, adding that SpaceX will "probably 10x the number of satellites." Combine the two, he explained, and "you could look at the Starlink Mobile leveraging the next-generation satellite and the EchoStar spectrum as being 100 times better — 10 times 10 — than what we've got right now."

From Dead Zones to Direct Competition

The upgraded network is designed to do what terrestrial carriers cannot: blanket the planet. Musk said Starlink Mobile will support "voice and video calls over Signal and WhatsApp" and will "eliminate dead zones," leveraging satellites overhead rather than ground towers. He argued the service would even hold up better during natural disasters, when terrestrial infrastructure often fails. That reliability builds on SpaceX's rapidly scaling constellation, which recently topped 10,800 satellites as the company expands capacity.

The commercial ambition is enormous. "The big three in the United States — AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile — roughly between them, $600 billion a year," Musk said. "And I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers because I think our service will be better." As Benzinga reported, shares of the incumbent carriers slipped on the remarks, a sign investors are taking the threat seriously.

A Fast Timeline

Musk laid out an aggressive schedule, saying SpaceX will "start to fly the satellites next year" with service launching "end of next year." That would put a full direct-to-phone broadband network in the field within roughly 18 months — an extension of the direct-to-cell momentum that has already made Starlink a partner and now a rival to major carriers, following deals like its expansion across the biggest U.S. airlines.

Starlink's growth gives the plan credibility. SpaceX said its subscriber base doubled to 12 million over the past year, and connectivity revenue jumped 66%, making it the company's largest business. Next-generation V3 satellites are expected to deliver roughly 10 times the capacity of the current generation, the raw throughput that a 100x mobile network would require.

The Bigger Picture

For years, satellite phone service meant slow, expensive, emergency-only connectivity. Musk is betting that Starlink can flip that script — offering full voice, video and data from orbit at a quality that rivals or beats the ground networks people use today. If SpaceX hits its timeline, the company that already dominates rocket launches and satellite internet could soon be competing head-to-head for a slice of a $600 billion wireless market. It is an audacious goal, but for a company that has spent two decades doing what skeptics called impossible, betting against it has rarely paid off.