Elon Musk thinks Starlink can shake up the mobile industry, but a T-Mobile exec said its strategy should be laughed out of the room.
"It's not a competitive threat from a wireless perspective at all," T-Mobile CFO Peter Osvaldik said Wednesday at Citi's 2026 Global TMT Conference.
"If we, as a management team, over the course of two months, changed the strategy to how we're going to roll out a wireless network like a dozen times, it would laugh us out of the room and kick me out of the management team appropriately."
Musk and SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell outlined their goals for Starlink Mobile in the company's first earnings call in early August.
The Big Three telecoms firms — AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile — make about $600 billion a year in revenue. "I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers because I think our service will be better," Shotwell said.
She pointed to Starlink's ability to "eliminate dead zones" and provide coverage in remote areas through its satellites.
It has 650 direct-to-cell satellites in orbit, as well as its flagship constellation of over 10,000 satellites for broadband internet.
However, for urban areas, satellites aren't as useful as cell towers.
Starlink's satellites operate in low Earth orbit, a few hundred miles above the planet, which means their signals reach cellphones quickly — though these signals can be blocked by typical city infrastructure.
"You can't get through buildings, walls. You can't even get through a Tesla windscreen," Osvaldik said. "You can have 1 million satellites up there with all the spectrum in the world, you can't break the fundamental laws of physics."
SpaceX isn't planning to rely only on satellites for Starlink Mobile.
Instead of using cell towers, which are expensive and difficult to install, SpaceX wants to use a huge number of small cell stations, called femtocells.
"Essentially, they're really just Starlink dishes that also provide connectivity in the mobile spectrum bands, and have them be all over the place," Musk told investors. "The Starlink antennas are located on the roofs of houses and businesses, so they've got a clear view for providing connectivity directly to cellphones on the ground."
Osvaldik ridiculed this idea, saying "everybody in the know" is "laughing at" it because potentially 1 billion femtocells would be required to match the coverage of cell towers.
"I mean, it's just not fathomable," he added.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
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Pete Syme is an aviation reporter for Business Insider, based in London.He writes about all things related to the industry, from aviation safety and CEO interviews to route reveals and airplane tours. Pete also uses data for industry analyses and to visualize breaking news events.Before joining Business Insider in 2022, he graduated with an MA in Newspaper Journalism from City, University of London, and a BA in English from the University of Exeter.
