Musk’s Starlink Eyes Buying Boost Mobile In Doomed Bid To Dominate Smartphones

One cornerstone of Elon Musk’s fraud-packed SpaceX IPO prospectus includes the claim that they’ll extremely quickly (as in a year or two) boost Starlink subscriber totals from 13 million to something closer to 300 million. Given the network’s congestion problems and physics constraints, that’s simply not realistic. Also: more users means even greater capacity problems and weird network restrictions.

To try and goose growth, Starlink has recently been making it clear they’d like to try and get into the cellular and smartphone business. But the actual plan is, as with all things Musk, a misleading, hot mess.

A key part of Starlink’s plan includes plunking down thousands of meshed femtocells installed on customer rooftops alongside existing LEO satellite dishes, something one telecom analyst recently stated was “one of the top three dumbest ideas in my four decades of being in this industry.”

In part because the femtocell installations are just logistically annoying and complicated, and will further will eat up capacity on the increasingly congested network (recall that Starlink customers in some areas already face “congestion fees” as high as $1500).

To goose growth Starlink and SpaceX have been gobbling up valuable wireless spectrum (with the help of Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr). They are also apparently in conversations to buy Echostar’s Boost Mobile prepaid brand:

“SpaceX has held talks with telecom firm EchoStar in recent months about launching its own signature wireless service through a deal with the company, the report said, citing ​people familiar with the negotiations. The move would support the Elon Musk-led ​company’s plans to build a hybrid satellite-terrestrial mobile network through Starlink ⁠Mobile, combining its satellite constellation with ground-based infrastructure to challenge US wireless ​giants AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.”

One problem? Boost mobile is just a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). It’s primarily just customer-facing retail artifice that runs on the back of existing AT&T and T-Mobile networks; neither of which is keen to have their cozy regional telecom dominance disrupted. To actually compete, Musk and Starlink would still need to invest hundreds of billions of additional dollars in a high-powered 5G network over the next decade. And even then there’s no guarantee of success.

You might recall that Boost Mobile was offloaded to Echostar as part of that doomed first-term Trump administration effort to approve the Sprint-T-Mobile merger, then hide its labor and competition impact by pretending that Dish Network would build a successful replacement 5G network. That of course never happened; the real impact was mass layoffs, higher prices and worse service for everybody.

I should note that the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr not only launched a fake “investigation” into Dish to try and force it to offload much of its spectrum to AT&T and Musk, but recent reporting suggests the Trump administration threatened Charlie Ergen with additional scrutiny if he didn’t ramp up his donations to Trump’s ballroom. So there’s entire layers of grift going on here.

Regardless: U.S. telecom is just generally a shitty market to try and disrupt. It’s extremely expensive and time consuming, and at every turn you’re likely to get creatively ratfucked by giants like AT&T and Verizon, whose political influence over Republicans historically rivals Musk’s. Again, even traditionally staid and bullish telecom trade mags have expressed concerns that Starlink’s smartphone push is doomed.

I think this mostly all exists as a way for Starlink to hoard valuable spectrum and goose stock valuations. There may be some people at Starlink who have convinced themselves this will actually work (the fact SpaceX has been lobbying for phone unlocking rules suggests some potential earnestness), but U.S. telecom history is littered with these sorts of half-assed disruption efforts that routinely go nowhere.

I’m not prone to believe things that come out of the mouths of Verizon executives, but in this case I think Verizon CEO Dan Schulman is correct when he states it would cost SpaceX something akin to $300-$500 billion and five years build a network capable of really competing with cellular giants.

And that’s just network infrastructure; you still need to convince users to sign up, provide a quality experience, and provide useful customer support (something Musk companies historically aren’t interested in). While fending off the political machinations of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, who all but own the legislature in most states after a generation of lobbying and campaign contribution.

The Musk cult and our shitty corporate press will spend the next few years enamored with the fiction that “Musk is disrupting smartphones,” but this mostly just reads as further stock-fluffing performance by a man with more money than sense.