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- The president of T-Mobile and CEO of its parent company commented on Starlink Mobile
- He argues that a 200 billion dollar investment in spectrum and infrastructure is needed for it to compete
- Nevertheless, he takes it seriously and sees parallels with Tesla in the car industry
Between partnering with Qualcomm and getting the green light to operate internationally, SpaceX has taken some big steps to make Starlink Mobile a competitor to the major carriers. And this was just acknowledged by Tim Höttges – the chairman of T-Mobile and CEO of its parent company, Deutsche Telekom – in a recent earnings call where he said that “I take his [Elon Musk] Try seriously [sic]”.
In the Deutsche Telekom conference call, Höttges continued to highlight how much work – and investment – will be necessary for this attempt to actually deliver a real competitor.
First, Starlink Mobile will likely require much more spectrum than it currently has, with Höttges saying “he [Musk] has now purchased 76 megahertz of spectrum. By the way, we have 400 megahertz. So if you say now, okay, he can buy the spectrum prospectively, do your math. These are some sort of triple digit billions that are needed to get the spectrum position.
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A “200 billion dollar” investment
And it’s not just spectrum – Starlink Mobile will also need a lot of infrastructure on the ground, with Höttges explaining that “then he has to build a network. I can tell you we have 85,000 towers. No, he can rent towers, no question. But this is another $20 billion to $30 billion that is needed. Put antennas, you can even buy a cheap antenna and you can even buy a cheap antenna. way or you construct it in a new way, but you need money for that.”
Between all this, Höttges concludes that Starlink Mobile needs “at least a minimum of $200 billion” to “play” in this industry, and probably more. And even then, it’s an industry that Höttges argues T-Mobile and the other major carriers have “professionalized over the past twenty years” — suggesting that even with that investment, Starlink Mobile lacks the experience of the other carriers.
However, it doesn’t sound like Höttges is completely counting out Musk’s telecom dreams, noting at the end of it all, “Welcome to the party.” So this looks like a long and expensive road for SpaceX and Starlink Mobile – and experts mostly agree that the fourth largest mobile network in the US will be a big challenge…
Analysis: A long game, but there are Tesla parallels
From electric cars to aerospace, Elon Musk has an unrivaled track record of disrupting industries – but turning Starlink Mobile into a true competitor to the network giants could be one of his biggest challenges.
“There are a wide variety of challenges and roadblocks that stand in the way of Starlink Mobile,” Ookla’s lead industry analyst, Mike Dano, told us. “For example, it must build radios based on Qualcomm technology. Then it must attach these radios to cell towers throughout the country. Then it must launch thousands of new satellites that support the spectrum it is working to buy from EchoStar,” he said.
And this is far from the end of the list. “Then it must sell phones that support the various spectrum bands it hopes to use on its network. Then it must create an effective retail strategy to lure customers away from existing cellular providers in the United States.”
However, Dano says Starlink Mobile’s Qualcomm agreement this week was a big step toward “becoming a credible fourth national mobile network provider in the United States,” even if that process “will take several years.”
Telecommunications expert Tim Farrar, president at TMF Associates, agrees that an EchoStar deal is the most likely key to unlocking spectrum, which T-Mobile’s Tim Höttges referred to in the earnings call. “I think a purchase of the remaining EchoStar spectrum assets and a settlement with the tower companies is the easiest and fastest way to do that,” he said, referring to the missing pieces for Qualcomm equipment.
Nevertheless, we can expect this story to develop rapidly in 2027, and Tim Höttges is well aware of the parallels with the car industry, which Tesla has disrupted with new technology. “I would compare it to let’s say Tesla inventing and bringing electromobility to a kind of legacy internal combustion engine industry. That’s the same moment we have and this moment is here now,” he said.
“We have a new type of player coming into the ecosystem. He has chipsets, he has data centers, he has AI, he has satellites, he wants to go for mobile services and he goes for mobile phones. He will also go to maybe integrate social media or at least agent models into his service.
“That’s why I say that I take this very seriously because I have witnessed what happened to the car industry – they have ignored it for too long and we have to face the situation.” In other words, expect this to be a big issue of 2027, even if the full story may take years to play out.
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