The order came out of Washington on a Monday, as such orders do — dense, dry, and heavier than it looks. In it, the Federal Communications Commission granted SpaceX’s request to deploy and operate 15,000 Starlink satellites built to carry connectivity straight to ordinary devices, and in the same stroke it waived the rule that would have forced Elon Musk’s company into a leasing arrangement with one or more ground-based wireless carriers. SpaceX, as Business Insider reported, may now run the service on spectrum of its own.
A waiver reads like a footnote. This one is a door. The leasing requirement had until now kept Starlink’s phone service bound to T-Mobile, LavX News noted, and the company says the new constellation will push speeds toward 150 megabits per second, against roughly four on today’s network. Freed from the middleman, Starlink gains room to compete head-on with the three houses that have long divided the American wireless market among themselves: Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile.
“With this action, SpaceX’s planned deployments will reshape spectrum-based connectivity by improving competition, allowing more consumers more choices in more places to further the Commission’s goal to ‘connect everyone, everywhere to modern communications services,’” the FCC said in its order.
The sky, in any case, was already filling. In January the commission authorized an additional 7,500 second-generation Starlink satellites, bringing the approved Gen2 total to 15,000; half of them must be in orbit by December 1, 2028. What Monday’s order adds is not metal but permission — the right to be a carrier without first asking one for a seat at the table.
The view from the corner office
The empires of buried cable do not sound afraid. “We’ve seen no zero discernible impact on our broadband growth from any LEO, low earth orbit satellite provider, including Starlink,” Verizon CEO Dan Schulman said at a Goldman Sachs conference last month, adding that he does not view satellite as a “viable competitor in the medium and even longer term.” The old telephone companies have outlasted many challengers, and they know it.
Perhaps they are right. But the rulers of every network have believed their wires permanent; that is what rulers of networks believe, right up until the wires stop mattering. Whatever its paperwork says, the commission this week declared the sky to be part of the network, and handed the keys to a man who already owns more of it than anyone alive. The rest is arithmetic: fifteen thousand satellites, three carriers, one inheritance being argued over.