Deutsche Telekom chief executive Tim Höttges has put a price on Elon Musk’s plan to turn Starlink Mobile into a full US carrier competing with AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. Speaking on the company’s third quarter earnings call on November 5, Höttges said SpaceX needs terrestrial service to play in connectivity, that he takes the attempt seriously, and that matching the established carriers would cost, in his assessment, at least a minimum of €200 billion, about $223 billion, or beyond. His closing line was, “Welcome to the party.”
The arithmetic he offered was spectrum and sites. SpaceX has bought about 76 MHz of spectrum, including its deal for Grain Management’s nationwide 800 MHz portfolio, against roughly 400 MHz held by T-Mobile. After spectrum, Höttges argued, SpaceX has to build a network: towers, tower rental, antennas and deployment across a footprint comparable to T-Mobile’s roughly 85,000 sites, a leasing bill other reports of the call put at $20 billion to $30 billion on its own. He also repeated the industry position that satellite connectivity is not a substitute for terrestrial service, particularly indoors.
The comments follow a sequence of SpaceX moves that have forced carrier responses for weeks: a multi-year 5G infrastructure agreement with Qualcomm for radio equipment, baseband units and software, and reports that SpaceX is seeking access to about 80,000 US cell sites. Höttges also made clear, in the fuller remarks reported from the call, that Deutsche Telekom finds it very difficult to see a wholesale arrangement under which SpaceX would rent capacity on T-Mobile’s network, which matters because renting is the cheap route to carrier scale and US cable operators have already used it to take a large share of phone net additions.
Deutsche Telekom’s own quarter gives the incumbent position some weight. The group reported third quarter revenue of €31.1 billion, up 7.5 percent, service revenue up 6.1 percent to €26 billion, and adjusted net profit up 12.7 percent to €3 billion, with 126.2 million mobile customers across its European units. The $200 billion class estimate is an interested party’s number, and Verizon’s chief executive offered an even higher range last month, but the strategic question it frames is real: whether SpaceX builds, buys or rents its way to terrestrial scale.