Category Archives: The Industry

The End of ReConnect?

USDA has proposed a budget for the next fiscal year, starting October 1, which contains drastic cuts for broadband. Overall, the agency is proposing to cut its overall discretionary funding by $4.9 billion, a 19% reduction. The cuts align with the proposed White House budget recommendations for the next fiscal year, that includes the following language:

USDA’s Rural Development programs are streamlined to focus on programs that have demonstrated efficient results and are an appropriate Federal role. . . No new USDA funding is needed for broadband expansion, as existing balances and other Federal resources are meeting planned growth. The Budget would also eliminate programs that are duplicative, too small to have macro-economic impact, costly to deliver, in limited demand, available through the private sector, or conceived as temporary. These include rural business programs, single family housing direct loans, self-help housing grants, telecommunications loans, and rural housing vouchers. Rural Development salaries and expenses are reduced commensurately.

Probably the biggest headline in the proposed USDA budget is that it completely eliminates the ReConnect grant program. The agency argues that ReConnect funding would be duplicative since  BEAD and other grant programs have eliminated the need for additional rural broadband infrastructure spending.

There is still $230 million remaining in the proposed budget for rural broadband, including $200 million in new broadband loans and $30 million in rural telehealth grants. The new budget claws back $40 million in unused funds still sitting unclaimed in the ReConnect pilot program.

This may not be the end of the ReConnect story, since Congress has the ultimate say in the budget. The program is still very popular with politicians. There have been several occasions in the past when Congress added funding for Reconnect during the reconciliation of the annual agriculture budget. As recently as November 2025, Senators Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) and Peter Welch (D-Vermont) introduced a bill that would provide $650 million annually through 2030 for ReConnect. But unless something like that bill happens this summer, the ReConnect program would be officially dead in October.

If ReConnect dies, there will be almost no remaining federal broadband grant programs. There is still $500 million available to NTIA for Tribal grants, but that’s the only remaining funding I am aware of. It would be a shame to see broadband grants disappear. Everybody who understands rural broadband knows that there will still be plenty of broadband gaps after BEAD grants are finally awarded. Some of these gaps will come from grant defaults. I’m hearing rumblings of BEAD defaults where ISPs will walk away from BEAD rather than sign the BEAD contracts. There will likely be more defaults of RDOF. There are a lot of projects funded by ARPA and the Capital Project Fund that won’t finish construction before the funding dries up at the end of this calendar year.

Defaulted grants aren’t the only places that won’t have good broadband. Jim Stegean, the president and CEO of CostQuest, which manages the FCC broadband maps, recently estimated there will be 2.1 million unserved or underserved locations left after BEAD. I think that number is conservatively small due to ISPs that claim 100/20 Mbps or faster in the FCC maps, but are delivering something slower. Not included in this estimate are the many urban MDUs that don’t have adequate broadband – something that was theoretically addressable by BEAD.

We’ll have to wait out the Congressional budget cycle, but unless somebody in Congress works hard to resurrect BEAD, the last broadband infrastructure grant program will soon be dead.

Broadband Shorts April 2026

The following are topics I found to be interesting but which didn’t justify an entire blog:

Update on the Telecom Act? Congressman Brett Guthrie (KY-02), Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Congressman Richard Hudson (NC-09), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, announced a hearing titled The Telecommunications Act of 1996: 30 Years Later. The stated purpose of the hearing is to examine the lessons learned from an examination of the Act. The hearing announcement suggests that Congress will see “how Congress can build on those lessons to modernize our laws to promote innovation, strengthen competition, and drive investment in modern communications networks.”

It’s obvious to anybody who follows telecom regulations that a lot of the changes made in the Act were quickly obsolete when broadband products became the predominant products of the telecom industry. Every reform effort has to start somewhere, and maybe this is the first step towards real discussions on updating telecom regulation. But in an industry dominated by regulatory capture from carriers, it seems highly unlikely that Congress has the appetite to take a fresh look at regulating the large carriers.

Will Starlink Bail on BEAD? A group of twenty House Democrats wrote a letter to Arielle Roth, head of NTIA, expressing concern that Starlink will walk away from the BEAD grants. The concerns come because of requests made by Starlink to state broadband offices for waivers of some of the ongoing reporting requirements that apply to all grant winners. For example, Starlink asked to be excused from conducting speed tests or providing ongoing financial reporting. NTIA has already told state broadband offices that states don’t have the authority to relax any BEAD reporting requirements. Perhaps the House members are worried that NTIA will issue a nationwide waiver for Starlink.

Arielle Roth said recently that states would have to reconsider the awards to Starlink if the company defaults. This has the industry wondering if defaults could result in an invitation for ISPs who want to build fiber or fixed wireless networks to rebid to serve such areas. In most states, there is still a lot of unspent grant funds that could be used for this purpose.

Copper Thefts by Organized Crime? AT&T published a blog that speculates that the magnitude of the theft of telephone copper wires is a lot higher than what might be attributed to random acts of crime. Rahdeese Alcutt, the lead investigator for AT&T Global Security, speculates that thefts in places like Southern California are likely coming from organized crime. The blog points out that it’s not just telephone copper wires being stolen, but anything made of copper, like material in railroads and transit systems, power utilities, HVAC systems, and city lighting systems. He says there are now days with hundreds of thefts of copper. Alcutt thinks this is an organized effort because it involves the use of heavy equipment and a well-coordinated effort to avoid law enforcement.

Fear of the Kessler Syndrome? LeoLabs, a company that monitors satellites in low-earth orbit reported that a Starlink satellite suffered an “anomaly” and broke apart into space debris. LeoLabs believes the likely cause was an “internal energetic source” and not due to a collision with another satellite. This is a concern because of the Kessler Syndrome, which predicts that there is some level of space debris that will result in a spreading cloud of debris that will destroy other satellites and result in a circling cloud of debris around the Earth that would be a barrier to space travel.

This risk increases as the number of satellites in orbit increases. The announced plans of current satellite companies could result in hundreds of thousands of satellites in low-earth orbit within a decade. The more satellites, the higher the chance of having catastrophic collisions. LeoLabs is not predicting that this anomaly will be a problem, but nobody knows what it might take to initiate the cloud of debris.

FCC Suspends Lifeline Providers. The FCC has always investigated fraud in the Universal Service Fund. The agency recently blocked seven individuals from ever participating in USF again after they were convicted of fraud. All of the convictions involved E-Rate reimbursement for broadband at schools and libraries. The fraud covered a range of bad behavior. A few individuals embezzled money that was legitimately paid to school systems. A few submitted fraudulent invoices to the E-Rate program or hired unsavory E-Rate partners.

California’s Middle Mile Fiber Network

California initiated its Middle-Mile Broadband Initiative (MMBI) in July 2021 with $3.25 billion in funding authorized by Senate Bill 156. On April 2, Governor Newsom announced that the first portion of the network would be activated and ready to provide wholesale broadband access.

MMBI is an extensive fiber network that stretches across the state, as shown on the map below. What’s not obvious on this map is how the network reaches throughout cities like Los Angeles to reach underserved and low-income neighborhoods.

The first live customer on the network is the Bishop Paiute Tribe located at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Inyo County. The Tribe is the recipients of a grant to build last-mile fiber funded by an NTIA Tribal grant. The connection to the MMBI network brings the backbone bandwidth to support the local network, and the fast speeds on the fiber network were immediately activated by the live connection to MMBI.

The bill authorized various parts of the state government to coordinate the construction of MMBI:

  • CENIC Middle Mile Broadband Initiative, LLC was authorized to be a third-party administrator to manage the development, construction, maintenance, and operation of the network.
  • The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) works with CENIC to determine the routes and access points on the network.
  • Caltrans will manage construction along state highways.
  • The Middle-Mile Advisory Committee (MMAC) was created to oversee the project and to advise on issues like the rates charged for connections on the network.

MMBI differs from state-owned networks in many states in that its goal is to provide affordable affordable backbone connectivity to ISPs, municipalities, Tribes, and others who want to provide last-mile broadband or cellular service. Many statewide fiber networks were built to provide broadband to government buildings and anchor institutions, but don’t allow middle-mile to be used for commercial purposes. I hope that States might look at what California has one and will open up their State fiber networks to provide affordable backhaul.

The network shown on the map above is the first phase. The state is open to proposals for joint construction with other entities to continue to expand the network to additional communities.

The $3.25 billion of spending, just within California, shows the inadequacy of the $1 billion middle-mile grant program authorized by Congress as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Lack of affordable fiber middle-mile is still a glaring issue throughout rural America, and California is to be lauded for starting to solve this issue in the state.

Leftover Copper Customers

I read that T-Mobile was thinking about buying the fiber assets of UNITI, which includes the fiber assets of Windstream. Regardless of whether that sale happens or not, it made me wonder about what happens to the customers served by copper who don’t go with a sale. Copper customers would be those served with telephone copper who are buying traditional TDM telephone service, DSL, and T1s and related products.

The concept of buying only fiber customers from an ISP seems to be a new industry theme. Lumen sold its fiber customers to AT&T but retained the copper customers. We know Lumen’s stated plans when it sold fiber customers to AT&T. The company publicly said it would retain and care for its copper-based consumer services since they continue to provide a strong ongoing financial contribution to the company.

But will they really? I have to think that a lot of Lumen markets were a mixture of copper and fiber, and that a lot of the technicians and much of the support apparatus for caring for these customers will leave with the fiber customers. I could be wrong, but I find it hard to imagine that Lumen will provide a robust maintenance crew to take care of the copper customers. This seems even less likely for a smaller company like Windstream. Will the remaining company really want to keep the entire company structure needed to take care of copper customers? That’s not only technicians in trucks, but it means somebody to man the central offices, somebody to field customer service calls, somebody to take technical service calls and dispatch repairmen.

I have a hard time picturing a telco willing to retain all of these functions to care for a fraction of their previous customers and for a shrinking customer base. This would also mean having to keep technicians who understand copper. I already know that all big telcos have lost most of their experienced copper technicians to retirement. I have a hard time envisioning technicians willing to go to work for a telco that only owns copper – there would be no upward mobility to learn newer technologies, and the job is guaranteed to end when the copper is eventually decommissioned. Does anybody really want to be a Lumen copper technician?

It seems buyers of fiber customers don’t want the hassle of buying the copper networks and then having to go through the process of disposing of the copper and disconnecting customers. It’s fully understandable that a company like T-Mobile wouldn’t want to take on that burden with UNITI. The FCC recently changed the rules to make it easier to dispose of copper customers, and as part of that order, the FCC overrode any state regulations related to disposing of copper customers. But the FCC did not eliminate all regulatory rules related to owning a regulated telephone company, and I’m sure that one of the  motivations for a company like T-Mobile not to take copper customers is to avoid getting dragged into that regulatory world.

Windstream and Lumen got some recent help from the FCC when it said that companies with copper networks can ‘grandfather’ their TDM products, meaning they don’t have to sell services to any new customers. While the FCC order didn’t use the term, this means the end of the carrier of last resort responsibilities for telcos.

I would not be surprised to see Lumen or other companies stuck with a copper-only network take the path of milking any remaining revenues from those customers, but doing nothing to retain or maintain the customers. For example, if a copper customer has a technical issue, they might be dropped instead of trying to fix the problem. This kind of approach would keep revenues for a while while eliminating most of the cost of keeping and operating a copper network.

Some Thoughts on Convergence

An article in Light Reading reported that the largest cable companies captured about one-third of the net cellular customer additions in the fourth quarter of 2025. This statistic combines the cellular sales of Charter, Comcast, and Optimum. The overall cable industry statistics would be even higher if it included sales from Cox and Mediacom, which are privately held.

Industry analysts are using the word convergence as shorthand for competition that bundles cell service with broadband. Convergence is the newest strategy that replaces the traditional bundling strategy of selling a package of broadband, cable TV, and voice.

Industry press over the last year is full of articles that wonder about the ultimate success of the strategy. Cable companies seem to have the upper hand in a convergence bundle since they collectively pass roughly 122 million homes. I’ve read a few analysts who argue that the big telcos like AT&T and Verizon are at a disadvantage since they pass a lot fewer homes with fiber.

But I think these analysts are missing something. There are three players in the convergence battle, and each is using a different tactic:

  • Cable companies are finding success with the convergence bundle by combining full-price broadband with inexpensive cellular service. The main goal of the cable companies is to reduce broadband churn, and a customer loses their cable company cell service if they drop broadband.
  • The fiber parts of the telcos don’t seem to be pushing the convergence package to the same extent. They are mostly still betting that people like fiber a lot more than cable broadband. However, AT&T just announced a fiber/cellular bundle with gigabit and one cellphone for $90 and two cellphones $120.
  • The third competitors are the FWA cellular companies. They are bundling full-price cell service with inexpensive broadband. At least for now, they seem to be winning the convergence battle. In the fourth quarter of last year, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon added over 1 million net FWA customers while the rest of the industry barely grew.

I know it seems odd to be counting the FWA competitors as different than the fiber telcos, since they are largely the same companies. But anybody who follows these companies understands there is not a lot of bleed-over between the wireline and the cellular parts of the businesses. The FWA division of the telcos are willing to compete for a fiber customer from their own sister companies.

It’s becoming clear that affordability is a major issue for a huge number of households. As long as that stays in the forefront, it seems like many households will lean towards the convergence plan that gives them a significant discount. I doubt that customers care if the discount comes from a lower price for broadband or cellular.

I think the cable companies are on to something with their focus on reducing churn. I talked to a few people in the last year who wanted to leave Charter and move to fiber broadband but didn’t want to lose their cheap cell service – and didn’t want to go through the hassle of replacing both services at the same time. The cable companies were really good at the triple play bundle in the 2010s, and a huge number of households felt they were held captive by the bundle. Are we headed back to that same place, but this time with multiple bundle options that force customers to buy both services from the same company?

Perhaps led by the recent new plan from AT&T, perhaps the fiber telcos are ready to jump into the convergence battle. I have wondered for years why they didn’t lead the market in this effort, and I guess it was due to internal battles over which division swallowed the bundling discount.

A Peek Into the Latest Merger

The most recently announced merger is between GFiber and Astound. It’s an interesting merger that brings together a premium fiber overbuilder and a traditional cable company that also owns some fiber assets.

GFiber has been somewhat of a mystery in the industry since its splashy launch in 2021. Known then as Google Fiber, the company was the first to introduce the whole country to the idea of gigabit fiber. There had been a few municipalities, cooperatives, and small telcos that offered gigabit broadband before 2012, but Google Fiber made big national news when it said it was going to overbuild the Kansas City metropolitan area and offer symmetrical gigabit fiber as its only broadband product. Google Fiber believed in simplicity, and originally only offered broadband before eventually layering on Google Voice and YouTube video. The company has always guarded any discussion of customer counts, but we are learning through news of the merger that GFiber has over 2.6 million passings, which means it probably has more than 1 million fiber customers.

Astound Broadband is a conglomerate of three broadband businesses.

  • The original Astound started as a cable company in the San Francisco Bay area. The company purchased additional cable properties in Washington and Oregon and rebranded as Wave Broadband.
  • RCN was founded in 1993 and had the unique business plan of overbuilding existing cable companies using cable company technology. The company was concentrated in the northeast, with the most customers in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Allentown, and Washington DC.
  • Grande Communications was founded in San Marcos, Texas, in 1999. The company started by providing cable TV to campuses at Texas State University, the University of the Incarnate Word, Baylor University, and the University of Texas at Austin. The company grew to have over 1.1 million passings.

The merger announcement says that Astound covers around 4.6 million passings and has around 1 million broadband customers. The combined company would have 2 million customers and 7.1 million passings. This would make the company the seventh-largest ISP after Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, Altice, and T-Mobile. The seventh ranking recognizes the merger of Frontier with Verizon, the sale of Lumen fiber customers to AT&T, and the upcoming merger of Cox and Charter.

The merger has GFiber spinning off from Google’s Alphabet. The majority owner of the combined company will be Stonepeak, with the GFiber parent retaining a significant minority stake. The merger is supposed to close in the fourth quarter of this year. The GFiber executive team will lead the combined company.

This is an interesting merger that brings together companies using different technologies. I would have to think that the goal will be to upgrade to coaxial networks to fiber, or possibly to DOCSIS 4.0 to bring symmetrical gigabit speeds.

After this merger is completed, the only remaining large merger target is Altice, with over 4 million customers. There are no other ISPs left in the market that have more than a million broadband customers.

Americans and Our Smartphones

According to a survey conducted by Reviews.org, many Americans spend a lot of their waking day with their smartphones. The survey was conducted with 1,000 people in the fourth quarter of 2025. This was not a high-accuracy survey, and the results have an accuracy of plus or minus 4%. But the overall trends are clear, and the survey results don’t vary a lot from year to year. Consider some of the following statistics:

The average participant in the survey used their phone 5 hours and 1 minute per day, which works out to 83 days of the entire year. Boomers used their phones the least, at an average of 2 hours and 8 minutes per day.

The average American checks their smartphone 186 times per day. That works out to almost 8 times per hour. This is lower than the statistic from 2024 of 205 times per day.

84% of respondents checked their phone within ten minutes of getting out of bed.

50% of people sleep with their phone by their bed.

Something that doesn’t surprise anybody who has gone to a restaurant lately, 56% of respondents use their phone while eating dinner.

71% of respondents check their phone within five minutes of getting a notification.

Something that sounds icky to me, 68% of people use their phone while sitting on the toilet.

87% of people use their phone while watching TV.

72% of respondents use their phone while at work.

A scary statistic is that 29% of respondents use their phone while driving.

61% of respondents have texted somebody who is in the same room.

53% of respondents have never gone an entire day without using their smartphone.

41% of respondents panic when their battery drops below 20%.

Probably the most telling statistic is that 46% of respondents say they are addicted to their smartphone. This is up from 43% reported in the 2024 survey.

I’m not a big smartphone user, and these statistics always surprise me. The statistics help to explain why the new converged bundle of broadband and cellular is so powerful.

Impacts of the RAM Shortage

Starting in late 2025, the world began experiencing a big shortage of memory chips used in the manufacture of smartphones, computers, and other consumer electronics. The shortage has been caused by chip makers across the industry deciding to manufacture more lucrative chips for AI data centers. As an example, during the last year, we saw Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix stop making RAM for consumer devices in favor of AI chips.

Random access memory, or RAM, is a crucial component in devices like smartphones, computers, and game consoles. RAM chips are what allow a computer to perform functions like keeping multiple tabs open in  a browser,

In the fourth quarter of last year, the demand for RAM chips exceeded supply by 10%, and the shortage is quickly growing. By the end of 2025, the price for RAM increased by 50%, and the supply chain delays to get chips suddenly slowed to a crawl. If an electronics factory wants chips sooner, they’re being forced to pay a premium price and pre-pay for a large supply. The shortage is expected to last at least into 2027. A few companies, like ChangXin Memory Technology and Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp. have stepped up to enter the consumer RAM market. There are predictions that RAM prices will increase at least 60% this year, with specialty chips possibly doubling or tripling in price.

This is bad news for the broadband industry since the price of computers and smartphones will climb, likely out of the reach of the budgets of many households. This is going to increase the cost of all of the network electronics used for fiber, cable HFC, and wireless networks.

This is bad news for the nonprofits that have been refurbishing used computers and smartphones. One important part of many upgrades is to increase RAM capacity for old computers to be able handle new web needs. If RAM prices double, these entities will not be able to help nearly as many people. The problem will be made worse since small buyers of RAM will probably be the ones seeing the biggest price increases.

Digitunity recently published an article that estimates that 32.9 million people can’t access broadband from due to the lack of a computer. That’s about 10% of households, a number that compares with other estimates of the homes with broadband.

More expensive computers will hurt broadband adoption, and that hurts the public and the economy. People are increasingly reliant on access to broadband. The federal government, and many state and local governments, are eliminating the ability to communicate with the government by anything other than web portals. Federal services of all sorts, like veterans benefits and Social Security, are moving online.

The IRS and many states expect taxpayers to file tax returns using online software. This software is difficult to navigate with a smartphone, as are many other government portals. The IRS and other federal agencies will also no longer issue paper checks, forcing people to have an electronic way to receive and access payments from the government.

FEMA announced last year that anybody affected by a disaster must make a claim online, which is a particularly ironic requirement for folks who might have just lost a home due to a flood, tornado, or hurricane. For anybody who has ever dealt with a disaster result, there is a mountain of communication needed to push a claim through to the finish line.

People in rural areas increasingly need to use telemedicine as rural hospitals and clinics continue to fail and close.

A computer at home is vital for working from home or taking college and other classes online. These are also tasks that can’t easily be done by smartphone.

A Rural Cellular Story

I was looking through the FCC cellular map in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where I live. For those not fully familiar with the FCC broadband maps, the agency publishes two maps: the more familiar one that shows broadband coverage and a second that shows cellular coverage. You can toggle between the two maps at the FCC’s map website.

It struck me while looking at the details in the maps that rural cellular coverage is changing, and not in a good way. I started by looking at a small section of the county that is on the outer fringe of where the Asheville outer suburbs turn rural. According to the FCC cellular map, the area I selected has the following cellular coverage:

These two tables tell me the following:

  • AT&T and Verizon have some 4G coverage. But the Verizon coverage is likely very weak since they don’t claim it will work in a moving vehicle. While AT&T claims its 4G coverage will work in a moving vehicle, it’s curious that AT&T doesn’t have 5G. This tells me that the AT&T signal is also likely weak since it is outside the 5G coverage area.
  • The only carrier claiming relatively solid 5G (35/3 Mbps) is Project Genesis, which is EchoStar. The company has exited the facility-based cellular business and is in the process of dismantling cell sites.
  • T-Mobile claims both 4G and 5G for outdoor cellular coverage, but doesn’t claim it can work in a moving vehicle, meaning the coverage is also probably weak.
  • The last carrier listed is UScellular, which claims 7/1 speeds on 5G, but doesn’t claim to be able to provide coverage in vehicles. UScellular was purchased by T-Mobile, and the rumor is that any UScellular towers that already duplicate T-Mobile coverage are likely to be decommissioned.

The bottom line is that this particular neighborhood has weak cell coverage. The only carrier that claimed to be able to deliver 5G to a moving vehicle is now out of business.

I picked this neighborhood at random, but I think I would find the same story in most of the areas on the fringe of the metropolitan area. The coverage in areas that are completely rural is worse. The story I gleaned from this neighborhood is troublesome for several reasons.

  • The folks who live here don’t have a lot of options. The only carrier that might work in the way people need cellular to work is AT&T, but this neighborhood is outside the AT&T 5G coverage, and the 4G coverage is likely weak.
  • It looks like decent coverage was finally becoming available from EchoStar, but that’s now gone.
  • The speeds shown in the table are for outdoor coverage, and speeds inside homes are typically half of outdoor speeds.
  • When you look at the details in the FCC cellular map you quickly understand how the advertised national footprints of the big carriers are exaggerated.
  • The bad news is that the FCC considers this neighborhood to be served by cellular. That means if the FCC finally launches the 5G Fund for Rural America, this neighborhood will not be considered for funding to add a new cell tower.

Filling the Sky with Satellites

The skies are quickly filling with communications satellites. Following is a short list of the many ventures that have or will soon be launching large numbers of broadband satellites.

Starlink now has over 10,000 operational satellites in orbit, with the ultimate announced goal of reaching 42,000 satellites. The company is not sitting still and will be introducing its new V3 satellites sometime this year, that promises to provide 10 times the download and 24 times the upload capacity of the current V2 satellites. That should mean a big boost in the capacity of the Starlink constellation and faster speeds. Starlink is likely to maintain a major advantage over competitors through its use of the reusable Starship rocket.

Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper) currently has around 212 satellites in orbit. The company was recently granted a two-year delay by the FCC of its original commitment to have an operational network by this summer. The company also recently got approval from the FCC to increase the constellation size to 7,700 satellites. The company is working to accelerate satellite launches and launched 32 satellites in February using the Ariane 64 rocket. Amazon Leo has contracted for 18 additional launches with Arianespace.

Eutelsat OneWeb is currently operating a 648 satellite constellation in twelve polar planes that is providing broadband to enterprise, government, and maritime customers. Its key markets today are in places like Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan. The company has ordered over 300 additional generation 2 satellites that should start being deployed later this year.

Blue Origin, a rocket company, plans to launch a constellation of 5,408 TeraWave satellites starting at the end of 2027. The company is promising speeds up to 6 Tbps. The constellation will be comprised of optically connected satellites using both low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO). The satellites will be interconnected using optical lasers. The target market for Blue Origin will be enterprise, data center, and government customers who need a reliable primary or secondary broadband connection. They think their primary market will be in remote, rural, and suburban areas around the world, where the cost of providing diverse fiber paths is too expensive.

Telesat’s Lightspeed satellite business got its start in December 2026 with the launch of its first two satellites. It plans are to launch 157 satellites by the end of 2027, with an ultimate goal of 298. The first 156 satellites will focus on support for NATO and allied nations. After that, the company hopes to be able to provide global coverage for enterprise customers, including the aviation, maritime, energy, and government sectors.

China’s Guowang (the National Network) has launched 164 satellites and has plans to launch 12,992 satellites to compete with Starlink. The company plans to launch 310 satellites in 2026, 900 in 2027, and 3,600 per year starting in 2028. There will be two separate constellations, one at 500 to 600 kilometers and a second around 1,145 km.

Quinfan (also known as Spacesail or G60) is being developed by Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST). The company currently has 108 satellites in polar orbit as part of its first constellation of 648 satellites. The company has announced long-term plans to reach over 15,000 satellites.

Meanwhile, there is another space race happening for companies wanting to provide direct-to-device cellular service. The key players are Lynk Global, Skylo, a partnership between SpaceX and T-Mobile, a partnership between AST SpaceMobile and AT&T/Verizon, and a partnership between Globalstar and Apple.