Tag Archives: StarLink

Have We Given Up on Expanding Rural Cell Coverage?

The number one concern I hear from most rural counties today is no longer broadband connectivity, but the availability of cellular connectivity. While there may be a few exceptions, I don’t know of any rural counties that have good cellular coverage. All that differs among counties is the degree to which they have poor coverage.

At one point, the FCC had a plan to subsidize more rural cell towers that it labeled as the 5G Fund for Rural America. In August 2024, the FCC adopted preliminary auction rules for distributing up to $9 billion to support new rural cell towers, while also issuing an NPRM that asked for industry feedback on several issues related to the new plan. This was going to be funded out of the Universal Service Fund, in what seems like a replacement use for the second round of RDOF that never happened.

Chairman Carr dissented from the 2024 FCC order, saying that he supported the idea of a reverse auction to build more rural cell towers, but he thought it was premature to announce the new plan until the FCC knew more about the disposition of the $42.5 billion in BEAD grants. He thought it was vital that any new rural towers have access to fiber.

Several big things have happened since August 2024. BEAD got delayed when the new administration completely changed the rules and made the states start over. The FCC has also decided to reexamine the Universal Service Fund from top to bottom, and if you read between the lines, the agency doesn’t seem to be a big fan of ongoing rural subsidies. Congress is also supposedly examining a major rework of the Universal Service Fund and said recently they should be able to propose specific legislation soon.

But the biggest change is that there is suddenly huge amounts of money being poured into creating a satellite-based cellular industry. The folks behind that effort are making claims that D2D (direct-to-device) technology will solve the rural cellular issue since everybody will have cell coverage. There are a lot of players suddenly in this space. Not surprisingly, SpaceX / Starlink already has hundreds of satellites in orbit and was recently approved to launch 15,000 satellites. AST SpaceMobile is partnering with AT&T and Verizon. Globalstar originally pioneered Apple’s SOS emergency test service and was recently acquired by Amazon, which recently applied for licenses for 5,105 satellites. Lynk Global has partnered with more than 45 cellular companies worldwide. EchoStar and Viasat have also announced plans to enter the market.

Today’s blog asks if the FCC is now assuming that the commercial sector will take care of the rural cellular issue so they can wash their hands of the issue. I find D2D to be intriguing, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions about D2D’s ability to substitute for local cellular service:

  • Are the D2D providers really aiming to compete where there is no coverage today? SpaceX just paid an astonishing $8 billion for 800 MHz spectrum from Grain Management that is intended for D2D service. But this spectrum is intended to be used at terrestrial towers to reach customers, with the backhaul for the service provided by satellite. This might create a new cellular competitor in urban and suburban markets (or this might be more intended to bring competition to parts of the world where cellular is the only broadband technology). But this application won’t reach any rural customer who is already within range of a cell tower.
  • Can’t Work Indoors. A cellphone transmits at under 0.5 watts of power – the maximum power level set by the FCC. Cell signals lose from 50% to 90% of the signal strength when passing through a wall. While that usually is enough power to reach a cell tower located within 2-3 miles of your house, it’s probably never going to be enough power to reach a satellite.
  • Receiver Limits. Starlink is now achieving data speeds up to 300 Mbps download for home broadband. However, speeds will be far less for an outdoor cellphone due to the tiny size of the antennas. Receivers for Starlink range from 11.75 X 15.7 inches for the Starlink Mini to 22.7 X 20.1 inches for the higher-performance receiver. The typical cellphone has a receiver of around 6.5 X 7 millimeters, meaning that even the Starlink Mini receiver has 2,600 times more surface area for receiving a signal from the satellite than a typical cellphone.

It’s already clear from early tests that this technology is wonderful for providing a connection to 911 for somebody who is outdoors. It seems to work for voice calls. But that’s a far cry from this being a technology that would make rural cell coverage equivalent to urban cell coverage. It’s hard to see this supporting websites and videos, and even so, only outdoors. I fear D2D will deliver ‘good-enough’ connections to allow regulators to decide they don’t need to deal with the issue of rural cellular coverage. But folks who live in rural areas will understand the differences and won’t have much better coverage than they have today.

Ookla Speeds by State

Ookla issued one of its periodic reports that looks at broadband speed statistics across the country and ranks the states in terms of overall broadband speeds. The report uses speed test data at the end of the second quarter of 2026.

https://www.ookla.com/research/reports/50-us-state-broadband-speed-report-1h-2026-access-form

As usual, this kind of report has to be taken with a grain of salt since it averages all broadband speed tests from all ISPs and all technologies, so there are a ton of factors that influence a state’s broadband speed. Issues like the mix of people electing slow versus fast packages, the mix of technologies and ISPs, and the degree of competition all impact a given state’s average speed.

In general, speed tests also tend to understate ISP performance. Speed tests not only include customers with good broadband speeds that performs as intended, but speed tests capture the slower speeds due to WiFi issues within customer homes. I’ve always wondered if people having broadband problems take more speed tests than those who have good performance. The good news is that these kinds of issues affect customers everywhere, and so probably average out when comparing states.

The good news across the country is that broadband speeds are improving. When Ookla first published this report for June 2024, there were only ten states with at least 60% of speed tests above the FCC’s definition of broadband speed of 100/20 Mbps. In this latest measurement in 2026, only four states failed to meet that threshold – Alaska, Wyoming, Wisconsin, and Montana. Thirteen states now have at least 70% of speed tests beating the FCC definition of broadband. That’s pretty significant improvement in just two years.

It’s not surprising that the top-performing states in the past, like Connecticut and New Jersey, didn’t see much improvement in broadband speeds – mostly because the states have had a high percentage of homes with the option to buy gigabit broadband. The state with the biggest improvement from 2025 to 2026 was Maine, which grew to 63% of households achieving 100/20 speeds or faster in 2026 compared to 57.6% in 2025.

Ookla just started to track Starlink speeds in 2025 but is already seeing some big improvements in speeds. One of the interesting statistics in the reports is Starlink speeds by state. There are several factors that influence Starlink speeds the most. One is tree cover, and sure enough, states like West Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas are near the bottom of the list of state speeds, while plains states are near the top. But the other issue is that Starlink doesn’t have the same coverage everywhere. It’s not talked about a lot, but there are different numbers of satellites in different orbit paths. I assume Starlink puts more satellites in orbits that cross the most potential customers – and we can’t forget that the company makes that decision on the worldwide market, not just the U.S. There may be other issues affecting Starlink speeds – perhaps areas with greater numbers of customers have slower speeds.

Overall, Starlink speeds are improving. In June 2025, no state had 50% of Starlink customers meeting the FCC 200/20 Mbps definition of broadband. In the 2026 report, seventeen states now exceed 50% of speed tests faster than 100/20 Mbps. The state with the biggest improvement was South Dakota, which now has 58.2% of customers exceeding 100/20 Mbps, compared to 37.1% a year earlier. Ookla notes that the size of the sample in South Dakota is so small that both numbers might not be reliable.

Finally, Ookla looked at rural broadband performance. Only three states didn’t see an improvement in rural speeds between 2025 and 2026. One can presume that much of this is due to the broadband networks that were being built as a result of ARPA and CPF broadband grants. Maine, Wyoming, Vermont, and Wisconsin saw the biggest improvements in rural speeds.

Hourly Broadband Billing?

Starlink recently announced plans for some interesting billing options. First, they will consider allowing customers to resell bandwidth to their neighbors by setting up small local grids. They are also considering allowing for billing by the hour, day, or week. What’s interesting about this is if this introduced in the U.S., it would allow for broadband billing in ways that already happen in many other parts of the world.

As an example, I’ve done some work in Nigeria, where customers struggle to afford broadband, and only businesses and relatively wealthy people buy unlimited monthly plans. The vast majority of broadband is provided by cellular carriers. There are a number of options for buying broadband for short periods of time. Unlike here, there is no loyalty to a specific cellular company, and a customer can choose to buy what is commonly called a daily plan from multiple cellular companies, and many people carry multiple SIM cards. These daily plans are most commonly sold in one- or two-day increments. The bandwidth on the daily plans is relatively small, with a daily cap of something like 240 MB, which might support WhatsApp messaging (which everybody uses), emails, or light browsing for things like shopping. Carriers also sell more robust data packages. For example, a customer can buy a plan for a specific app like TikTok or Facebook/WhatsApp for the day or month. Carriers also sell night plans by the day that provide enough bandwidth to download movies when the network isn’t busy.

There is a growing amount of fiber being constructed in Lagos and other cities. In Lagos, the government builds and leases out a conduit network to lower the cost of market entry for ISPs. Fiber networks deliver slower speeds than in the U.S. but are still far more robust than cellular data. Fiber providers also sell daily or weekly plans.

I can’t recall ever hearing of anybody in the U.S. trying hourly, daily, or weekly billing before. I recall some municipal Wi-Fi networks that tried to sell WiFi access that way to visitors and most failed at it. In the early years of airport WiFi, short-term billing plans were also being pushed.

If Starlink markets short-period billing in the U.S., it is a tacit recognition that a lot of people can’t afford a monthly subscription. Selling broadband by the day is broadband rationing and will lead to the kind of customer behavior I’ve witnessed in Nigeria, where customers save up broadband tasks for when they buy a daily plan. While this is better than not having broadband, it’s second-class broadband for those who can’t afford a full-time broadband subscription. Considering the number of households struggling with paying essential bills, there is likely a market for this.

The idea of allowing a customer to become a hub and share with neighbors is interesting. This is already a lot more common than you might imagine. It’s common for neighbors in apartment buildings to split a broadband bill and share WiFi through the walls. I know of examples of neighboring houses sharing broadband by running a cable or setting up a point-to-point wireless link between homes. Starlink is suggesting that people formalize this, including providing a discount for the home that becomes the main hub.

This is more of an urban idea than a rural one since homes need to be relatively close to share the signal from a common Starlink receiver. This could be a way for Starlink to crack the urban market by allowing several neighbors to share a connection to save money.

Starlink is clearly familiar with these kinds of models since it works worldwide. The company would have little chance of competing in Nigeria and many other African countries if it doesn’t allow for the way that people already buy broadband. It’s going to be interesting to see if the company really pushes these two ideas in the U.S.

SpaceX Wants to End Rural Subsidies

SpaceX has now told the FCC multiple times that the agency should begin the process of phasing down and eliminating all rural high-cost subsidies from the Universal Service Fund. The company filed comments asking for the end of subsidies in FCC Docket 26-96, which is looking at reforming the High-cost fund for an all IP Future, and in Docket 10-90 that was looking at Universal Service Fund reform. In both filings, SpaceX says that its proliferation of low-orbit satellites means that rural subsidies are obsolete and are no longer needed. The company characterizes anybody who disagrees with it as a “subsidy-dependent incumbent”. SpaceX goes on to argue that the money currently spent on rural subsidies should be redirected to programs that lower the cost of broadband for low-income families.

It’s an interesting policy question that raises more questions about satellite broadband than it does about the rural companies that are receiving broadband subsidies. For example, the CAF II subsidy is being provided by a number of rural ISPs who use the subsidy to justify building and maintaining rural fiber, similar to what was done with the FCC RDOF.

I think the SpaceX request raises multiple policy questions. First, is satellite really providing broadband? Earlier this decade the FCC declared that Starlink was not providing broadband when the agency canceled the $885 million award Starlink had won in the RDOF reverse auction. At the beginning of this year, Ookla said that only 45% of Starlink customers were meeting the FCC’s definition of broadband at 100/20 Mbps. But Starlink’s speeds have been slowly improving, and will be boosted over the next five years as the company replaces the current V2 satellites with the new V3 satellites that provide 10 times more download capacity and 22 times more upload capacity.

As I have argued many times, the FCC’s 100/20 Mbps standard is no longer a reasonable definition of broadband. Recent data from OpenVault showed that 43% of U.S. households now subscribe to speeds faster than 500 Mbps download and 70% of homes subscribe to speeds of 200 Mbps or faster. It’s hard to look at these statistics and think that 100 Mbps is still an adequate definition of a good download speed. However, the real issue for satellite broadband is the upload speed. A large percentage of the homes cited by Ookla as having fast download also get far faster upload speeds than 20 Mbps. Fiber overbuilders are mostly providing symmetrical data speeds, meaning gigabit upload speeds. Cable companies across the country are upgrading the upload path and are delivering speeds of 50-100 Mbps at a minimum, and in some networks, gigabit upload speeds. The whole country learned during the pandemic that 20 Mbps upload is not adequate to support more than one user at a time – something the FCC has steadily ignored.

Another issue raised by the SpaceX request is whether Starlink provides a good substitute for voice service. Much of rural America lives in areas with little or no cellular service. The companies that receive high-cost subsidies all must pledge to offer voice service so that rural residents have access to 911. SpaceX argues that anybody with a satellite broadband connection can buy VoIP. That’s a true statement, but it raises two more policy questions of availability and affordability.

The companies receiving high-cost funding agree to service every home and business in their footprint. It’s pretty clear that Starlink can’t make that claim. While the company won’t disclose the number of homes it can serve in any given geography, there are examples, like last year’s Burning Man, where Starlink got overwhelmed by too many customers in a rural area.

I think the most important factor is affordability. Starlink’s price of $130 per month is a lot higher than other rural broadband options. Companies that receive high-cost support sell broadband for a lot less than $130, but more importantly, will sell voice-only to customers who don’t want broadband. It’s not reasonable that a rural household that can only afford voice and not broadband should have to spend $130 per month for satellite service.

In my mind, Starlink has to offer a different set of products if they want to declare that they can match the benefits that companies that receive high-cost funding bring to customers.

  • Starlink needs faster upload speeds, which it probably will eventually get as it phases in the V3 satellites.
  • Starlink would have to be able to serve everybody in a geographic area if it wants to see the subsidies end in a given area. I can envision a regulatory test similar to the one that cable companies have used to get regulators to declare a market to be competitive. High-cost subsidies should only stop in an area where every customer in the area could be served by a satellite instead.
  • Finally, Starlink would have to be a lot cheaper. If SpaceX wants to see the rural high-cost subsidies ended, it should offer lower broadband prices in those markets, including a really low-cost connection for voice only.

Starlink’s Other Network

The Benton Institute recently wrote an article that reminded me that Starlink is operating a second satellite network, separate from the one used to serve residential and business broadband customers. The company announced this network, which it dubs Starshield, at the end of 2022. Today, this network is now highlighted on the SpaceX website.

Starshield is touted as a military-grade network, which in layman’s terms means a separate network that doesn’t share any traffic with commercial customers. In the U.S., the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has launched several hundred Starshield satellites. This is the federal agency that has always operated military and spy satellites. The British Ministry of Defense is also said to be migrating to the Starshield platform. Other militaries around the world that use SpaceX, like the well-known use of Starlink in Ukraine to direct drone traffic, use the normal commercial Starlink satellite platform. Benton reports that Starshield and Starlink are not yet fully separate, and that a Starlink outage affects Starshield performance, but it’s likely that the company is working towards total independence.

SpaceX touts several benefits of Starshield. They can use whatever level of encryption of traffic required by a government customer. The satellites can also carry custom payloads, which likely means spy cameras or other devices. SpaceX also says it can integrate Starshield into other satellite networks.

Since nobody I know will even be using a government spy satellite, you might wonder why I am writing about Starshield. I’ve been wondering lately about Starlink’s claim that it is interested in providing backhaul to cell sites and bigger broadband connections to rural businesses. This has always puzzled me because, at the local network level, a satellite network is no different than any other network. If Starlink were to connect to a handful of cell sites in a given rural area, the bandwidth used for the cell sites would reduce the capacity available to residential customers. There is only so much bandwidth available in a localized satellite footprint.

We know this is true, because even today, there are stories of localized Starlink areas getting overwhelmed. There were reports during the Burning Man festival last year that nearby Starlink customers complained about loss of bandwidth when festival attendees brought along their Starlink Mini satellite dishes.

This makes me wonder if Starlink plans to have separate satellites just for backhaul. We know what that might look like. OneWeb, owned by Eutelsat, provides big bandwidth to European government locations and large businesses. The company currently has around 650 satellites in orbit to support bigger bandwidth users.

It wouldn’t be hard for Starlink to carve out satellites that specialize in large customers. The company currently has 11,100 satellites in orbit and should be close to its original approved constellation of 12,000 by the end of the year. The FCC has already given the company permission to grow the constellation to 15,000. And since SpaceX is never satisfied, it’s already asked the FCC for permission to double the constellation to almost 30,000 satellites. It doesn’t seem like it would be much of a challenge for Starlink to carve out 500 satellites from the large constellation to specialize in backhaul. This would not only open up new revenue opportunities but would also mean not diluting bandwidth delivered to its millions of residential customers. This is all pure speculation on my part, but its an idea that makes sense.

The Risk of Space Collisions

A recent article in Scientific American looked at the likelihood of collisions between satellites and other devices in orbit today and in the foreseeable future. This is becoming an increasingly important question because of the increasing number of satellites. There are currently 18,000 satellites in orbit, and 29,000 total objects, including spent rocket bodies, dead satellites, and large pieces of space debris. Goldman Sachs research says there could be as many as 305,000 satellites in orbit by 2031 and 1.7 million by 2036. Even if the actual numbers are half that, it means a huge number of orbiting objects in space.

As we put more satellites in space, the chance of collisions increases. This matters because major collisions can be disastrous, as colliding satellites break up into smaller debris that can act as orbital bullets to smash other satellites. Scientists have postulated many scenarios where some parts of space become unusable. Space debris generated at the lowest orbits can fall out of space after a few years. However, the article cites a scientist who says that debris at higher altitudes stays in orbit a lot longer. He said that at 1,200 miles above Earth, debris can persist for 100,000 years.

One prediction in the article is that there is already a 29% chance of collisions per year at altitudes between 520 and 605 kilometers since there are numerous discarded rocket stages the size of school buses at those altitudes that can’t be maneuvered to avoid a collision. The danger  of collisions at those higher orbits is that the debris will rain down and endanger all other satellites below. This might not create dead orbital zones, but it would greatly increase the risk of operating a constellation and would compel satellite operators to send excess satellites into orbit in anticipation of losing some of them.

Perhaps the biggest concern of all is the process of monitoring satellites to avoid collisions. Until recently, this process was done manually, but this now requires automated tracking of satellites to predict collisions. In the last year, Starlink says it performed 300,000 adjustments to avoid collisions, which works out to 40 maneuvers per satellite per year. Scientists worry that this will become impossible at some point as the number of satellites grows. It’s particularly worrisome since many of the counties and companies that plan to put satellites in orbit may not interface well with rival companies and countries. There’s nothing that compels them to do so.

A really scary scenario is the aftermath of a major solar storm that knocks out the electronics of many satellites. We’ve had several such solar storms just in the century we’ve been tracking solar events. A satellite that is disabled by a solar storm would become a dead object that would not be able to maneuver to avoid collisions. The article cites an expert who predicts that a killer solar storm would lead to major satellite collisions within days.

The biggest concern of all for me is that nobody is governing satellite traffic safety. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Switzerland, which is part of the United Nations, approves worldwide spectrum for satellites and loosely coordinates assigned orbital slots. However, the ITU doesn’t consider the capacity of a given orbit to handle satellites as part of its review process. With dozens of countries planning to launch satellites, space is becoming the Wild West. It might take a major event to get the world interested in doing the hard work needed to make this work.

Starlink’s Interesting Approach to Cellular

There was an announcement on SpaceX’s first-ever earnings call that got the attention of the wireless industry. SpaceX said on the call that StarLink would enter the terrestrial cellular business by building a large number of cell sites provisioned with satellite backhaul. The company would leverage the power of its next-generation V3 satellites along with an increasingly larger fleet of satellites to provide the backhaul to feed cell sites.

It’s impossible to know if the company is serious about this. Elon Musk has always made exaggerated claims of what he will be doing in the future, and many of his claims never came to fruition. On the same call, Elon also said that the company plans to build factories on the moon.

There are a number of obstacles that stand in the way of SpaceX pulling this off. First is the basic question of why anybody would wade into the U.S. cellular market that has become increasingly competitive. Starlink could probably only gain significant numbers of customers by lowering prices, and that brings into question how profitable this might be.

Cellular networks in cities have already boosted cellular data speeds to 300 Mbps or faster, so Starlink wouldn’t have any technological advantage. Perhaps the real goal of the company is not the U.S. market, but populous countries like Nigeria, which have inferior cellular networks and a population that relies on cellular much more than on landline broadband.

At least for now, Starlink doesn’t have enough spectrum to pull this off. They are acquiring 65 MHz of spectrum from EchoStar, which is not nearly enough to compete for terrestrial cellular service. However, after the recent IPO, the company is awash with cash and could buy more spectrum. In the OBBB, Congress mandated the FCC to find 800 MHz of midrange spectrum for auction, so there will be plenty of spectrum coming into play over the next decade.

Another big question for me is the overall bandwidth needed to feed a cellular network. Most cell sites today are fed with 5-10 Gigabit backbone connections. The new Starlink constellations will have a greatly increased amount of capacity, but the backhaul to hundreds of thousands of cell sites would have to eat into the overall capacity of the satellite constellation. SpaceX must be counting on being able to grow far past the current 15,000 satellites currently approved by the FCC, and in fact, they have requested to grow the constellation to 100,000 satellites. The increasing usage to support cellular would also mean the need for a lot more earth stations to feed the network.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle would be getting started. The three big carriers all have roaming agreements with each other, but they might decide not to make it easy for a new competitor to enter the market. Very few people would buy a cellular service that wouldn’t work when they travel to other parts of the country. There was speculation after SpaceX made this announcement that the real purpose was to pressure the big cellular companies into giving the company an MVNO deal (resold cellular) so it could combine terrestrial resold cellular with satellite cellular. That’s an interesting dilemma for the big cellular companies, because if SpaceX had an MVNO, it could then selectively build cell sites over time.

SpaceX will likely never stop surprising the market with big ideas that are outside of the box. While this one is certainly doable, it wouldn’t be easy unless one of the big cellular companies blinks and lets SpaceX into the cellular business through the backdoor of an MVNO. But you can never say that SpaceX wouldn’t do this even without that easy onramp.

Satellite News August 2026

Starlink’s Capacity Growing. An analysis by MoffettNathanson estimated a huge increase in potential capacity based upon a migration to the new V3 rockets. The analysis said that the current capacity with the V2 satellites is between 8 and 16 customers per square mile, which limits the overall penetration to 2% – 3% of U.S. households, even when the current 15,000-satellite constellation is completed. The new V3 satellites should bring a lot of additional capacity, including the opportunity to sell broadband in denser population areas. MoffettNathanson estimates the overall capacity, assuming that two-thirds of satellites are upgraded to V3 by 2030, is between 24% – 35% of households, or the capacity to serve 35 million to 50 million potential subscribers. This increase is fully dependent on the company being able to regularly launch the new Starship rocket, which will only be able to carry 60 V3 satellites per launch. SpaceX successfully launched a Starship rocket on July 27 that carried twenty V3 rockets into space. This was a test, and the satellites were allowed to quickly deorbit.

Satellites Monitoring Wildfires. Satellites have been used to view the progress of wildfires, but to a limited degree of effectiveness. Existing satellites don’t notice fires until they have spread to several acres, and they typically only transmit a picture of a wildfire every twelve hours. The nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance has launched three satellites that are the beginning of a fifty-satellite constellation to detect and track wildfires in real time. The full constellation won’t be in place until 2030. The satellites are sensitive and will be able to see a fire as small as a 5-meter square. When fully deployed, the satellites will be able to give an update on a fire every twenty minutes.

A Big Drop in Satellite BEAD Locations. There is a significant drop in the number of eligible locations for the BEAD grant awards made to Starlink and Amazon Leo. The NTIA analysis compared the location of BEAD awards to the new FCC mapping fabric. The new mapping identified 50,578 BEAD locations that are no longer considered as mapping points, meaning they are probably buildings like barns and sheds. The analysis showed 262,053 locations that are now considered to be served by broadband of at least 100/20 Mbps. Finally, there are 61,512 locations that would be excluded if NTIA accepts broadband provided by unlicensed spectrum to qualify as served. Altogether, these reductions could reduce the amount awarded to Starlink and Amazon LEO by at least $354 million. Note that these same kinds of reductions are also being made to fiber and other technology awards as NTIA continues to nibble away at the total BEAD dollars being awarded.

 Texas Broadband Office Facing a BEAD Audit. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows called for an audit of the Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO). The audit is coming from industry allegations that BDO too heavily favored satellite broadband over fiber and other technologies. The BDO recently put the entire BEAD grant program in the state on hold, seemingly due to this issue. Even if the accusations are proven to be true, it seems highly unlikely that NTIA would allow for higher dollar awards if the State wanted to re-award canceled satellite locations to a more expensive technology.

SpaceX Rocket Hit the Moon. The discarded upper portion of a rocket launched in January 2025 by SpaceX crashed into the moon on August 5 at a speed of 5,400 per hour, creating a 60-foot-wide crater. The original launch was to deliver a moon lander.

Data Centers in Space. Early this year, SpaceX announced plans to put one million satellites in space to create a huge AI data center. Since then, additional applications for AI satellites have been filed with the FCC, including 88,000 satellites by StarCloud, 51,600 satellites by Blue Origin, and 20,000 by Cowboy Space. These are just the U.S. companies, and there are discussions around the world of creating orbiting data centers.

SpaceConnect Association Launched. In an inevitable move, the companies in the space business created a trade association that will propose and lobby worldwide for regulations that will “enable innovation, investment, and expanded connectivity through next-generation satellite networks”. The inaugural Board consists of Chair, Ashleigh de la Torre, Vice President of Public Policy at Amazon; Secretary, Michael Schwartz, Senior Vice President, Corporate and Business at Telesat; and Treasurer, Barbee Ponder IV, General Counsel and Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at Globalstar

Is Satellite Cellular a Competitive Threat?

It seems that one of the hottest topics in the industry is Direct-to-Device (D2D) cellular service that can bypass terrestrial cell towers and connect cellphones directly to satellites. I’ve already seen claims being made that D2D technology will solve the rural cellular issue since everybody will have cell coverage. Today’s blog looks at some of the reality behind these claims.

There are a lot of players suddenly in this space. Not surprisingly, SpaceX / Starlink already has hundreds of satellites in orbit and plans for 15,000. AST SpaceMobile is partnering with AT&T and Verizon. Globalstar originally pioneered Apple’s SOS emergency test service and was recently acquired by Amazon, which recently applied for licenses for 5,105 satellites for D2D. Lynk Global has partnered with more than 45 cellular companies worldwide. EchoStar and Viasat have also announced plans to enter the market.

Basic Technology. The satellites will circle at heights between 200 and 550 miles above Earth and will be traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. At least for now, nobody has figured out how to hand off calls between a satellite and terrestrial cellular network. There are some limitations for D2D that are largely defined by physics.

  • Can’t Work Indoors. Your cellphone transmits at under 0.5 watts of power – the maximum power level set by the FCC. Cell signals lose from 50% to 90% of the signal strength when passing through a wall. While that usually is enough power to reach a cell tower located within 2-3 miles of your house, it’s not nearly enough power to reach a satellite.
  • Receiver Limits. Starlink has been achieving data speeds up to 300 Mbps download for home broadband. Expect speeds to be far less for a D2D due to the much smaller antenna surface area in a cellphone compared to a Starlink receiver dish. In general, the larger the size of the antenna, the more bits that can be gathered. Receivers for Starlink range from 11.75 X 15.7 inches for the Starlink Mini to 22.7 X 20.1 for the higher-performance receiver. The typical cellphone has a receiver of around 6.5 X 7 millimeters, meaning that even the Starlink Mini has 2,600 times more surface area for receiving a signal from the satellite than a typical cellphone.
  • Area Speed Coverage Limits. The planned coverage area for the next generation of D2D Starlink satellite is around 45 square miles. The newer satellites will be using massive adjustable antenna beams along with 40 to 65 MHz channels. This means that a single data stream from a satellite will have an overall data capacity between 40 and 150 Mbps download, depending on the spectrum being used. Starlink is planning on 16 simultaneous full-power beams from the next generation D2D satellites. The challenge is that this spectrum must be shared among all users inside a beam footprint. That means a maximum of 2.4 Gbps of bandwidth to share in a 45 square mile area – a minuscule amount of bandwidth compared to what can be delivered by cell towers serving the same area. This is compounded by a limitation on the simultaneous number of users that can be connected at the same time.

What does this all mean from a practical perspective? The D2D satellites will be able to connect to a large number of people who are outdoors, within the overall limitation of the number of simultaneous people that can be connected at one time. We won’t know until somebody shows us what this will mean for connecting a lot of people in a small area, like at a rural rock concert.

Early trials have shown that D2D has some capacity for making a connection to a moving vehicle. This is never going to be as guaranteed as when standing outdoors, and it will likely depend on the type of vehicle and the speed being driven.

D2D is not going to work directly indoors. It’s possible that somebody will develop an outdoor receiver that can bounce a signal to go in through a window. It would make sense to do this in conjunction with something like a Starlink receiver.

It’s hard to envision D2D as a standalone cellular service other than possibly for the rare person who spends most of their time outdoors.

To be fair to the industry, at least for now, the big D2D providers aren’t touting it as a standalone cellular service. They are talking about this being an add-on to normal cellular plans. This doesn’t make much sense in urban areas where normal cell coverage is already ubiquitous and strong. But this could be an interesting additive to a cell plan for folks who either live or travel a lot in rural areas. It’s a cool technology, but a lot of the excitement could be empty hype, which seems to be the norm for most new technology products.

There is only one statistic that is really going to matter for D2D, which is the number of people willing to pony up a monthly fee to use it. The one thing going for the new technology is that there is a lot more serious demand for any kind of cellular coverage in the third world than there is in the rural U.S. Maybe that’s the real market they are shooting for.

SpaceX Wants to Handle the World’s Broadband

In a recent request filed with the FCC, Starlink asked to increase the size of its broadband satellite fleet to 100,000. This coincided with the FCC’s announcement that it wants to ease the process for approving new satellites, so I have to think the idea will sail through. There was one extraordinary statement in this filing that is the topic of today’s blog. SpaceX said it has the goal of handling the majority of the world’s Internet traffic. Elon Musk has always been one for huge hyperbole, so statements like this are not surprising. I want to examine a few reasons why that goal is ridiculous.

No carrier handles a large percentage of the world’s internet traffic today. According to statistics shown on Cloudflare Radar, the company with the biggest percentage of worldwide traffic today is Amazon, with 3.5% of all traffic. The companies that carry more than 2% of worldwide traffic include Cloudflare (2.2%), Comcast (2.5%), Amazon (2.4%), Microsoft (2.2%), Reliance/Jio (2.1%), and AT&T (2.1%). SpaceX is on the worldwide list at number 18 today, already carrying 0.7% of the world’s Internet traffic. SpaceX would have to grow by five times to catch Amazon. But that would still be a long way from carrying a majority of the world’s traffic, and it’s hard to imagine any carrier growing to carry even 10% of the world’s traffic.

Starlink has built an impressive ISP business by gaining 12 million broadband customers. Worldwide, there are over 6 billion Internet users, about 74% of the world’s population. If you assume an average of 2.5 people per household, Starlink today represents 0.5% of all residential Internet users. But residential broadband, as large as it is, is still only a fraction of the world’s Internet traffic. Again, according to Cloudflare, bots are currently making 56.8% of all web connections.

Starlink largely has a near-monopoly for satellite broadband today, but that’s going to change over the next five years. There are major plans by others to compete with Starlink, including Amazon, China’s Guowang, Shanghai’s Quinfan, Blue Origin’s TeraWave, and Eutelsat’s OneWeb. Competition will dilute Starlink’s share of the satellite market.

Love him or hate him, Elon Musk has aligned himself with politics, which is unusual for somebody operating a giant retail business. There are already many countries that ban Starlink, and this list could grow. Even in countries where Starlink is available, there are a lot of people who would never buy service from an Elon Musk-backed company.

I think the biggest reason is that there is a lot more risk associated with trusting your broadband to satellites. A massive 1,000-year solar flare could knock a lot of satellites out of commission. There is a real threat of a spreading cloud of space debris killing a lot of satellites, as predicted by the Kessler syndrome. There is a chance that satellites could be knocked out deliberately during a war or by a rogue nation.

Fiber networks face no similar worldwide threats. Large users of broadband are never going to trust their traffic to satellite. Don’t expect to see data centers, universities, governments, or large corporations favor satellite connections over fiber.

I have to admit that I like Elon Musk’s brashness, but his claims are always overboard. I think he has a better chance of establishing his colony on Mars than of capturing the majority of the world’s Internet traffic.