Musk, genius or lunatic, has no mobile answer in space or on land

7 Min Read

Elon Musk (pictured) keeps hammering on the door of US wireless, but can he break in?(Source: Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)

If any ordinary mortal talked in a regulatory filing about making humans a multi-planetary species, or reckoned AI would soon turn work optional and money worthless, or set out to compete against America's established wireless giants with some satellites and small cells, they would be quickly dismissed as a raving lunatic. When the person responsible is Elon Musk, who has done all the above, it is taken as a mark of his eccentric genius. To Musk's admirers, those who have immediately written off the trillionaire's latest plans for a mobile service risk doing a Ballmer.

That would be Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO, and his rambunctious reaction to news of the first iPhone launch. "Right now, we're selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year; Apple is selling zero phones a year," he said after an initial burst of laughter that rocked him in his seat. "In six months, they'll have the most expensive phone by far ever in the marketplace." Captured on camera in 2007 and immortalized by YouTube, the moment – from Ballmer's perspective – has not aged well.

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It is a hilarious lesson in complacency and hubris to everyone else. Ten years from now, if Musk's Starlink service provides smartphone connectivity for tens of millions of Americans through a mixture of low-Earth orbit satellites and residential small cell equipment, the experts who scoffed at Musk in 2026 could look like Ballmer did in 2007. Unfortunately for the Musk contingent, there are few parallels and little chance of it happening.

To recap, Musk last week snapped up a 14MHz chunk of 800MHz spectrum sold by Grain Management, an investment company that acquired the frequencies from T-Mobile US in the summer. Telco stocks fell on the day Musk's purchase became public – with T-Mobile's down 13% on October 9 – due to apparent fear this spectrum combined with his other assets will enable Starlink to build its own mobile network.

No horror show for Saw

The 800MHz band is an extremely useful one for providing a nationwide mobile service as the long-distance runner of the spectrum pack, able to carry signals over vast distances and deep into homes. Yet 14MHz is not very much spectrum, as John Saw, T-Mobile's chief technology officer, was quick to point out. "Even with this acquisition, Starlink Mobile would have roughly 80MHz of spectrum, some of it uplink only," he said in an article published on LinkedIn. "Compare that to T-Mobile's nearly 400MHz of mid-band and low-band spectrum holdings."

Paucity of holdings, however, is a problem Musk could feasibly address by mopping up more spectrum in the months and years ahead. The bigger problem is on the equipment side. "The frequencies associated with the 800MHz licenses will be added to the list of other frequencies authorized for Supplemental Coverage from Space [SCS]," said the Starlink filing with the Federal Communications Commission, seeming to answer that question. Next-generation satellites are being designed to use all sorts of frequencies and will feature silicon and phased-array antennas for that purpose.

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But no SCS spectrum at 800MHz is going to overcome the drawbacks of a basestation orbiting the planet at an altitude of 300 miles versus one down the road. As Saw described it more technically in decibel (dB) terms: "A satellite hundreds of kilometers above Earth faces approximately 50dB more path loss than a terrestrial cell site just a kilometer away. Moving from 2GHz to 800MHz recovers only a few dB of that enormous disadvantage." However brilliant he might be, Musk can't rewrite the laws of physics.

What this all translates to is a much poorer service for customers – slower, unable to support so many connections and sometimes unobtainable. In terrestrial networks, signals travel further in lower bands largely because those frequencies enable them to hurdle or sidestep obstacles more effectively, explained William Webb, an independent analyst, academic and author, on a recent Telecoms.com podcast.

Related:SpaceX: Grain's lowband spectrum is our ticket to becoming 'major mobile carrier'

"From a satellite point of view, it doesn't help to have lower frequency spectrum. All frequency is more or less equal," he said. While the 800MHz might offer a slight advantage over 2GHz spectrum, the same line-of-sight constraints apply for a satellite signal blocked by rooftops, forests or even just bad weather.

There are other constraints for satellite operators, too. "If you use lower frequencies you need a bigger antenna in space because you need to put your antenna elements further apart to get the same number of elements into it, so actually low frequency is less useful from a satellite point of view," said Webb. "You don't want to push it too far the other way because you end up needing handsets with lots of tiny antennas if you go sort of beyond 3GHz or 4GHz. So, actually, the spectrum he's got at 2GHz is probably spot on for the direct to device [D2D]."

Silence about small cells

Starlink, however, had seemed to recognize these various shortcomings of D2D satellite technology a few weeks ago when SpaceX, its parent company, published its first set of financial results since its initial public offering. Instead of relying solely on satellites to provide a mobile service, Starlink announced plans to build a terrestrial network. But this wouldn't be a typical network of "macro" sites, as operated by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. It would piggyback on the satellite dishes used by Starlink's broadband customers to construct a network of small cells.

The scheme was quickly slammed by people who include experts in small cell technology. Ignoring technicalities, the main issue is that Starlink served only about 12 million customers globally in the summer and those in the US almost certainly reside in rural communities where higher-speed and more reliable fixed-line alternatives are unavailable. Unless all this changes, Starlink's customers would not be able to use their phones in other places.

Since then, little has been said by Starlink executives about the plan. There was no mention of small cells in the FCC filing and only a single reference to rooftops. Potentially more interesting were some of the other details. "For terrestrial deployments, SpaceX plans to operate standards-based advanced wireless equipment. Deployment will rely on radios feeding sectorized antennas on towers, rooftops, and other structures, configured to provide reliable signal coverage and meaningful broadband service," it said.

Towers? Other structures? These were not in the small cell plan, implying Musk and his lieutenants have heard the criticism, re-examined the initiative and decided they need to build a macro network after all. The trouble is that doing so would take considerable capital, time and experience, as Saw pointed out in his LinkedIn article.

"The US wireless industry has invested more than $250 billion in network infrastructure since 2018," he said. "That's on top of more than $200 billion in spectrum auctions over the past decade, plus the stores, care, and distribution that support customers every day. And that investment represents only part of what it takes to deliver a great wireless experience," he said.

Not very Muskian

There is not an iPhone success story in networks, just a sequence of disappointments and failures that includes EchoStar-owned Dish, the company from which Musk acquired some of his spectrum. It had not been short of ambition, brandishing supposedly disruptive technologies and a cloud model backed by AWS. But the immense costs of building a new mobile network with an experimental approach proved too much and it filed for bankruptcy in June.

Walt Piecyk, an analyst with LightShed Partners, thinks an acquisition of Dish's network assets would be a "cheap no-brainer" for Musk. It would seem less expensive than trying to replicate that coverage with entirely new equipment. Musk seems unlikely to be capable of outdoing radio experts at Fujitsu, Mavenir and Samsung, all of which had contracts with Dish, or those at Nokia, an old-school European vendor today backed by Nvidia, or the people at Ericsson, a Swedish rival acknowledged as the 5G gold standard outside China.

But rolling out a terrestrial mobile service with any of those companies would seem quite retrograde, like building railways rather than rockets, and not very Muskian. The big question is why a trillionaire seen as a visionary by his followers would have any desire to provide a me-too service in a saturated, low-growth market. Influence? Reach? Such factors were clearly more important than commercial considerations when he acquired Twitter.

Many would flock to a Musk-provided service. If he could capture a decent share of the market, he might open a revenue stream that helps to fund his interplanetary mission. But the people already worried about the growing political and commercial influence of one of the world's most divisive individuals will look forward to a Starlink Mobile crash landing.

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