The FCC chair, who has gone out of his way to laud SpaceX’s connectivity from space and sometimes critique its rivals, said Wednesday that the market for direct-to-phone service needs more than one competitor to Starlink.
“We think the market wants to be, should be, at least three facilities-based providers,” Brendan Carr opined at a conference in Washington hosted by the wireless trade group CTIA.
Today, US options for more-than-messaging cellular satellite service stop at SpaceX’s Starlink roaming. It’s limited to a select set of apps and has seen less uptake among T-Mobile subscribers than the carrier expected after inking its deal with SpaceX in 2022.
Two other startups provide messaging only, Skylo and Globalstar, but Carr used an onstage conversation with CTIA President and CEO (and former FCC chair) Ajit Pai to give a shout-out to two other companies aspiring to offer data from low-Earth-orbit satellites: Amazon and AST SpaceMobile.
The former aims to provide satellite broadband from its Amazon Leo constellation via compact antennas starting in the middle of this year. But it also just announced plans to acquire Globalstar and leverage its assets to offer direct-to-cell service later on.
The latter, meanwhile, has already signed up AT&T and Verizon as customers for the smaller constellation of larger satellites it aims to put into service by the end of the year. AST’s ambitions, however, got set back when a Blue Origin-built New Glenn rocket failed to deliver its seventh BlueBird satellite into a viable orbit last month. Carr joked about that: “They’re launching satellites, usually in the right orbit, sometimes not.”
On Wednesday, AST announced plans to launch its next three satellites on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, underscoring the outsized role of Elon Musk’s space company.
Carr’s own conduct as FCC chair has yielded additional evidence of that. Last April, he told European telcos to choose Starlink over Chinese alternatives, and this February, the FCC fast-tracked SpaceX’s application to launch up to 1 million data-center satellites.
On Tuesday, Carr tweeted that the FCC was wrong to yank an $886 million broadband-buildout award from SpaceX in 2022 on the grounds that Starlink could not meet speed requirements throughout its service areas and would cost too much. Starlink lost an appeal of that rejection a year later, when speed tests from Ookla (owned by PCMag’s parent firm Ziff Davis) showed median download speeds of 64.5Mbps, well below the 100Mbps specified under that grant program.
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As Carr noted, the latest data from Ookla’s Speedtest app show median downloads of 127Mbps and median uploads of 21Mbps across the US. SpaceX’s residential broadband does remain expensive outside promotional discounts.
Carr used the rest of his brief appearance at the end of the CTIA Summit to tout the FCC’s accomplishments over the last year. For example, he noted that the FCC is back in the business of freeing up and auctioning off spectrum for wireless service, using authority restored by last year’s massive budget-reconciliation bill, and said the commission is now turning its attention to easing permitting obstacles to building broadband infrastructure.
Carr also commended President Trump’s moves to speed the development of AI, saying that his boss “has been very clear that he wants the United States to lead the world in AI.” He refrained, however, from getting quite as enthusiastic in his support for Trump as he did at last year’s CTIA Summit, when he described the FCC as “moving on Trump time.”
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.