Wireless

Elon Musk’s mobile moonshot still needs grounding

By Monica Alleven Aug 11, 2026 1:19pm

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and President Gwynne Shotwell gave the wireless industry a lot to ponder when they led the company’s first-ever earnings call last week
Analysts question how a small cell strategy will get a terrestrial network off the ground when SpaceX has so little spectrum at its disposal compared to the Big 3
Where there’s a will there’s a way? Maybe, but some industry watchers suspect the “we will build” mantra is really leverage to get an MVNO deal

A couple months ago, when many of us were debating whether Elon Musk would get into terrestrial wireless by striking an MVNO pact, buying a mobile network operator or building his own network, industry analyst Roger Entner was firm in his belief: Musk will build, not buy, his way into wireless.

Based on SpaceX’s big reveal in its first-ever earnings conference call last week, Entner was right on the mark. What followed in the past week is plenty of speculation about just how Musk will pull this off. Musk and SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell provided enough ammunition to get the chatter going but stopped short of explaining exactly how they’re going to lure customers away from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon with a better service.

They gave some hints, one being that Starlink could deploy something akin to femtocells on top of houses and other structures that are co-located with Starlink satellite dishes to provide terrestrial cellular coverage.

Let’s talk about small cells

That set off a torrent of speculation on social media on exactly how that’s going to flesh out. For a sampling, see here, here and here.

The prospect of “small cells” in any sort of deployment for cellular service immediately triggered PTSD among some wireless industry folks who remember all too well how certain mobile carriers (Clearwire, Sprint, to name a couple) attempted and failed with those devices.

Jeff Moore, who worked at Sprint from 2001 to 2015 before founding Wave7 Research, recalled how once upon a time, Sprint had a nationwide network in need of densification, which is when its management, under then-CEO Marcelo Claure, turned to small cells. Sprint inked a deal with Mobilitie (which has since wound up in Boldyn Networks) to use utility poles and other street “furniture” to house small cells using its rich portfolio of 2.5 GHz spectrum. That relationship ran into roadblocks.

Around that same time, Sprint introduced the Magic Box, an indoor device installed inside homes and buildings designed to boost cell signals (but it wasn’t the same as a repeater). “That was another way of getting coverage without having it all come from towers,” Moore said.

But this is different. This is Elon Musk and SpaceX, and the stakes are arguably higher. Satellites are better at providing coverage more affordably. SpaceX has at its disposal some 65 MHz of spectrum that it’s acquiring from EchoStar, both for satellite and terrestrial coverage. It’s not a lot, but it’s a start.

Entner: Wi-Fi as the on ramp

Fierce asked Entner how he envisions this unfolding. He said the small cell that’s at the center of the strategy disclosed thus far will not be of the typical femtocell variety that comes to mind when densifying macro terrestrial networks.

Rather, it will be in the form of the Wi-Fi router. Similar to the cable companies and their MVNOs, Starlink Mobile can create a second SSID/Wi-Fi identifier and achieve limited range around homes, he said.

Musk built his own Starlink router because he didn’t think anyone else’s was up to snuff and it’s proven to be a phenomenal piece of equipment, according to Enter. “He builds his own,” and that includes antenna, silicon and more. “He will build everything himself.”

The spectrum question

To get coverage beyond Starlink routers, SpaceX will need a broader mobility play, which is where the 65 MHz of spectrum they’re buying from EchoStar comes into play. However, that’s a mere drop int the bucket.

Each of the Big 3 own about 300 MHz or more of low- and mid-band spectrum, which amounts to about 10x what Starlink will own when the EchoStar transaction closes, noted long-time wireless analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson in a July report for investors (subscription required).

One way SpaceX can add to its spectrum portfolio is via next year’s upper C-band auction. SpaceX, given its market cap, would certainly seem to have enough capital to buy whatever it wants at auction, but FCC rules prohibit one bidder from waltzing away with the entire bounty. Plus, it’s mid-band spectrum, where signals don’t travel as far as lower-band spectrum.

Grain Management, which recently closed on its 800 MHz SMR spectrum purchase from T-Mobile, could be a source of low-band spectrum for SpaceX, Entner noted. That can serve as the spectrum layer to provide voice capabilities and get a foot inside buildings.

Other sources of spectrum on the secondary market are CBRS Priority Access Licenses (PALs), of which Verizon leads the way in actual deployments, mostly for venues like stadiums. EchoStar is still in possession of CBRS and AWS-3 spectrum that it expects to sell.

Distribution outlets remain key

Besides spectrum and the not-so-small task of building a network to compete with the existing terrestrial operators, there’s another key to the whole mobile game, and that’s distribution.

In total, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon have 17,000 storefronts selling their wares and that’s not counting prepaid, which would push that number to more than 30,000 combined, according to Moore.

Starlink lists 16 authorized retailers on its website where U.S. consumers can buy Starlink internet service. Wave7 Research has seen Starlink displays at Best Buy, Walmart, Sam’s Club, Home Depot, Bass Pro Shops and Nebraska Furniture Mart. Plus, Starlink is doing a lot if TV, radio, and outdoor advertising.

That might sound like a lot, but it’s not much compared to the vast distribution the Big 3 have established over the decades. “You definitely would need a national store presence for Starlink,” Moore said.

Elon Musk at the center of it all

There’s one more big thing in play here and that’s the very presence of Elon Musk himself. Even he acknowledges that what he says at times sounds crazy, like when he said that robots will be used to scale up manufacturing on the Moon. “I know this sounds totally nuts, but … We are going to land a lot of tonnage on the Moon. We're going to build the factories on the Moon,” he said on the earnings call.

On the same call, Shotwell said the total addressable market for the Big 3 mobile network operators is $600 billion when in actuality, it’s closer to $220 billion. Musk also said Starlink will deliver the majority of the world’s internet, at least in countries where it’s allowed to operate, in less than 10 years.

That kind of talk doesn’t necessarily add a lot of credibility, despite the trillions that SpaceX is worth on Wall Street.

“I don’t think we should take anything they say that seriously,” said Blair Levin, policy analyst at New Street Research and former chief of staff at the FCC. “Saying what they say doesn’t cost them anything.”

Fierce asked Levin how even though the physics sound out of whack, the conversation often veers back to this nugget: But it’s Elon Musk. Don’t ever underestimate him. He can, apparently, do anything.

Levin isn’t in the business of giving advice to wireless carriers; his constituency is the investment community. However, he noted the theory of economics of John Maynard Keynes. It went something like this: You’re not betting on what you believe to be true. Rather, you’re betting on what other people will believe to be true.

That goes to the heart of Musk’s style. “I think Elon is a distinctive character,” Levin said. “He’s really good at articulating a narrative about the future that gets lots of investors excited.”

As for their comments that Starlink will deliver a better mobile product than what AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon are delivering today, Levin said it’s hard to see how it’s going to be better. “Wireless is kind of a commodity right now,” he said. “I don’t see it as that big of a threat.”

Is it real or a ruse?

Plenty of folks still question whether this is all a ruse to get what Musk really wants: an MVNO with one of the big mobile network operators, something each of them have categorially rejected thus far.

“I think that it's possible that they're using the possible deployment of a mobile network as a bargaining chip to gain favorable access on an MVNO basis to a national carrier’s network,” Moore said.

On his podcast this week, Entner said he doesn’t take what Musk says literally. “I take him seriously,” he said.

Then there is the other nagging question: Why would Musk want to associate himself with being a telco, subject to all kinds of regulatory overhang and all that’s associated with that?

“He doesn’t want to be a telco,” Entner told Fierce. “He wants to be a connectivity provider. Look at the entire Musk stack. He has the satellite connectivity. He has Tesla. Every Tesla is a small data center that has a battery attached to it, with a Starlink antenna built in, and it has AT&T IoT to fall back on.”

All that being said and more, one thing U.S. mobile network operators might have on their side is time. Remember: What SpaceX and Musk are talking about isn’t going to come to fruition immediately, including handset compatibility. It’s more like 2028-2030 or even into 2031.

“If you think he will build a wireless network tomorrow, forget about it,” Entner said. “This story will be with us for quite some time.”