AT&T CEO John Stankey has sided with T-Mobile’s chief executive Peter Osvaldik in rejecting Elon Musk’s plan to disrupt the mobile industry with Starlink. Speaking to Axios, Stankey said SpaceX’s proposal to turn its satellite business into a global competitor to traditional telecom networks is “not a viable strategy.” He argued that fiber infrastructure remains superior, noting AT&T’s $3 billion deal with Corning to expand its fiber footprint. Earlier this month, T-Mobile CEO Peter Osvaldik dismissed Musk’s Starlink ambitions outright, and said that the strategy should be “laughed out of the room.” Osvaldik said Starlink’s approach lacked the scale and economics to compete with established carriers, reinforcing skepticism across the telecom industry.
What T-Mobile CEO Peter Osvaldik said first
T-Mobile CFO Peter Osvaldik was blunt in his own assessment of Starlink’s mobile ambitions, saying that “everybody in the know” is laughing at parts of the plan, and describing SpaceX’s proposal as something that isn’t fathomable from a technical standpoint. He argued Starlink doesn’t represent a real competitive threat from a wireless perspective, pointing to basic physics as the core obstacle: satellite signals, he said, can’t penetrate buildings, walls, or even something as simple as a car windshield, making Starlink’s direct-to-cell ambitions far less practical in dense urban environments than in the remote areas where satellite coverage genuinely shines.
AT&T CEO John Stankey’s rebuttal: Fiber beats satellite, full stop
Speaking to Axios, Stankey made a similarly confident case for why AT&T isn’t worried, backing it with a major infrastructure move. AT&T announced a $3 billion deal with Corning this week to expand its fiber infrastructure, arguing that fiber delivers speeds three times faster than satellite technology. Stankey didn’t mince words about the comparison, saying nothing beats fiber, and that even if satellite technology performs at its absolute best over the next decade, it still won’t be able to match what fiber delivers.
Why the rivalry is heating up
The pushback from both carriers comes as Musk and SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell have been increasingly vocal about turning Starlink into a genuine competitor to traditional phone and internet providers. Starlink already competes with legacy telecom companies for home and business internet customers, and the company has now started talking openly about a mobile business that would put it in direct competition with wireless carriers.Shotwell added fuel to that narrative in August, during SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company, predicting that SpaceX would be able to win over a meaningful number of customers from existing carriers because its service would simply be better. That comment rattled markets, sending shares of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile lower the following day.
The scale of Starlink’s ambitions
As of June 30, Starlink had 12 million subscribers and more than 10,200 satellites providing coverage across 167 countries, according to SpaceX’s first earnings report as a public company. While SpaceX’s rockets and AI work tend to dominate headlines, its connectivity business is actually the company’s largest revenue driver, accounting for 55% of total sales.Becoming a genuine fourth major US mobile carrier, however, would require significantly more terrestrial infrastructure to match the capacity of a traditional cellular network — a build-out one analyst estimated could cost SpaceX more than $100 billion. SpaceX believes it has found a cheaper alternative: installing small cellular base stations alongside Starlink dishes at homes and businesses, adding capacity where satellite coverage alone falls short, without needing to build the kind of sprawling cell tower network traditional carriers rely on. Musk has claimed these small stations could eventually deliver connectivity to phones with better and higher bandwidth than what’s currently available from existing cellular providers.
Why Stankey says the math doesn’t work
Stankey pushed back hard on that plan’s feasibility, arguing that installing enough small stations to match a traditional network’s capacity would cost roughly the same as simply building a full macro cellular network. He also pointed to a significant regulatory hurdle: current law doesn’t allow companies to radiate cellular signals from someone’s home without their permission, unless that law changes. He suggested that if the approach were genuinely viable and cost-effective, AT&T would already be installing similar antennas across its own massive existing fiber network.