The firm\u2019s Nasdaq-listed shares, which have recently fallen sharply from their 12-month high, rose 5.75% today to US$74.48.<\/p>\n
SpaceX confirms plans to go after telcos<\/p>\n
During SpaceX\u2019s quarterly earnings<\/a> call earlier today, president Gwynne Shotwell stated that SpaceX intends to use its newly acquired EchoStar spectrum and next-generation architecture to directly challenge major telecom carriers like Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile in the US.<\/p>\n A key weakness of SpaceX\u2019s mobile-to-satellite service today is that it needs line-of-sight to the sky. Partners like One NZ and recent signing One NZ (which got a new customer shout-out on the earnings call) are using the service to fill in mobile blackspots.<\/p>\n Newcomer AST SpaceMobile, launching later this year, says it has the capability to penetrate roofs by using low-frequency bands under its \u201ccell tower in the sky\u201d model.<\/p>\n But Shotwell surprised analysts by appearing to say that SpaceX would build its own cell towers on the ground in the US to complement its mobile-to-satellite service from above.<\/p>\n \u201cLet me give a little hint, and that is you could put a base station, a cellular base station, on basically the gear that holds a Starlink broadband dish. So you can have kind of these little femtocells around the country,\u201d Shotwell said.<\/p>\n A femtocell is a mini cell tower. <\/p>\n \u201cThe threat of satellite and leo [low Earth orbit] solutions disrupting telcos has been sitting on telco stocks year-to-date,\u201d Harbour Asset Management\u2019s Shane Solly recently told<\/a> the Herald, in the context of discussing Spark\u2019s depressed share price.<\/p>\n But there are political and logistical barriers to SpaceX launching a full-blooded mobile service in New Zealand.<\/p>\n Phone companies and satellite operators around the world can only lease spectrum from governments. The Trump Administration gave SpaceX the green light to buy spectrum rights from Echostar in a US$19.5b deal, first announced in 2025.<\/p>\n Our Government would have to give SpaceX the go-ahead to participate in a spectrum auction here.<\/p>\n And Gartner senior analyst Khurram Shahzad \u2013 a specialist in the satellite market \u2013 said<\/a> that even if Musk hit his goal for SpaceX-owned Starlink to launch 100,000 mobile-to-satellite capable satellites, it still wouldn\u2019t have enough bandwidth to beat congestion in urban areas (Starlink today has around 10,400 satellites in orbit, but only around 600 of those are its larger second-generation model capable of supporting mobile-to-satellite service).<\/p>\n Shahzad said the practical constraints of growing space junk would restrict Starlink to around 40,000 satellites, assuming it managed to gain regulatory permission.<\/p>\n