SpaceX has made no secret of its plans to enter the US telecom market, and earlier this month it bought more spectrum to turn Starlink Mobile into a full-fledged carrier. It’s also reportedly in talks to get access to at least 80,000 cell sites across the country. A quicker way to get started would be an MVNO deal with an existing carrier – basically, renting capacity on someone else’s network. Now, T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan has made it clear that this won’t be happening with his company.
Asked about it during T-Mobile’s Q3 earnings call yesterday, Gopalan said the carrier’s approach to MVNOs hasn’t changed. A deal has to bring access to a new addressable market, new distribution channels, or new capabilities. Since T-Mobile sees satellite service as a complementary product, an MVNO with SpaceX doesn’t tick any of those boxes. It wouldn’t help with the company’s edge AI plans either, as it’s already building out its 5G SA network and moving toward 6G. “I see no room for an MVNO with SpaceX either on the consumer side or on the physical and edge AI side,” he said.
T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan
That doesn’t mean the two companies can’t do business together. According to Gopalan, SpaceX being a T-Mobile customer, or the other way around, would simply be a commercial agreement. He also said he’s “very happy to look at a resale arrangement” for a complementary product, which is how the carrier already handles satellite with T-Satellite, “but an MVNO is a wholly different thing”.
Gopalan doesn’t see much value in satellite broadband for T-Mobile’s home internet business either. Apart from some deep rural areas, he called satellite “an inferior version of FWA” (fixed wireless access), with extra constraints such as the size of the beam. He also noted that two thirds of the carrier’s customers there are in dense urban areas. Interestingly, Verizon CEO Dan Schulman ruled out an MVNO deal with any satellite provider during his company’s own earnings call on Monday, so it looks like SpaceX will have to build that network on its own.
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