On Monday’s Verizon earnings call, CEO Dan Schulman laid out a blunt assessment of SpaceX’s ambitions to turn Starlink into a full U.S. mobile carrier.
According to Schulman, matching a terrestrial network like Verizon’s would require 65,000 to 80,000 macro cell sites, substantial spectrum, backhaul (fiber plus possibly satellite), radio access network equipment, and a complete retail and customer-service operation. He estimated the effort would cost between $300 billion and $500 billion over seven or eight years, with a minimum of four to six years just to build the network. Even then, he argued, Starlink would only become the sixth—not the fourth—competitor in the U.S. market.
Schulman was careful to say he assumes SpaceX will execute “flawlessly.” He simply believes the physics and economics of dense urban and suburban coverage still favor traditional towers. “There’s no magic wand. There’s no secret sauce. There’s no shortcut,” he said.
Elon Musk’s reply on X was characteristically short: Will take 2 or 3 years
That single sentence captures the real divide. Verizon is pricing a classic terrestrial build-out. SpaceX is pricing a different architecture—one that leans far more heavily on satellites, software, and iterative hardware launches. Whether that architecture can deliver competitive capacity and latency in the densest areas remains the open question.
What’s not in dispute is that the conversation has shifted. A year ago, satellite-to-phone service was still largely experimental. Today the CEOs of the largest U.S. carriers are openly debating timelines and capital requirements for Starlink Mobile as a potential national competitor.
The next two to three years (or four to six, depending on whose clock you trust) will tell us which model is closer to reality.
Written with assistance from Grok, built by xAI