T-Mobile to Expand Coverage With the Help of SpaceX’s Starlink Satellites

Sometime before the end of 2023, T-Mobile aims to start augmenting its coverage using an unusual set of cell sites—all moving at about 17,000 miles an hour(Opens in a new window). 

On Thursday night, the wireless carrier announced a “Coverage Above and Beyond” plan with SpaceX, which will use its constellation of low-Earth-orbit Starlink broadband satellites to provide messaging for T-Mobile. Voice and data are expected later on.

T-Mobile CEO and President Mike Sievert and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed this project at an event hosted at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, which was streamed live(Opens in a new window). 

“It is about solving the biggest pain point in the over-40-year history of our industry,” Sievert said, standing in front of a set of booster and upper stages of SpaceX’s giant, fully reusable Starship rocket. “This partnership has a vision that is the end of mobile dead zones.”

Future versions of Starlink satellites will use mid-band spectrum compatible with most handsets—a block running from 1.91 to 1.995GHz that T-Mobile picked up with its purchase of Sprint but has yet to move to its 5G network. And, Sievert underscored, almost all of T-Mobile’s phones already support this band. 

“We’re using a piece of spectrum that your phone already knows,” he said. “The vast majority of phones out there, our aspiration is for them to work right out of the gate with this.” 

The two firms plan to open a beta test of Starlink-routed messaging “in select areas” of the US and its territorial waters—including Hawaii, parts of Alaska, and Puerto Rico—by the end of 2023. 

“We expect, on our most popular plans, for this service to be included for free,” Sievert said. He also noted that T-Mobile would open this for roaming use by customers of other countries’ carriers if they would reciprocate with their networks.  

A press release says this messaging support will encompass “SMS, MMS, and participating messaging apps,” which may or may not mean Apple’s iMessage and the Google-backed RCS as well as such third-party options as the open-source Signal and Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp. 

Sievert said that would depend on cooperation from messaging providers to help it “separate messaging traffic from all other traffic” and “make sure they’re working with us in a payload-aware way.” 

Voice and data look to be very much a version-2.0 item. “This won’t have the kind of bandwidth that a Starlink terminal would have,” Musk predicted, adding that it should yield 2 to 4Mbps per cell zone and in good conditions should yield enough for “a little bit of video.” 

Answering a question about this service’s utility during extreme weather, both execs suggested the FCC will appreciate the added resilience Starlink could bring. 

“One of the big benefits of this is redundancy,” Sievert said. Echoed Musk: “Even if all the cell towers were taken out, your phone would still work.”

SpaceX now has 2,806 Starlink satellites working in orbit about 350 miles up, per the count of astronomer Jonathan McDowell(Opens in a new window), and has been deploying another 60 every few weeks on launches of its Falcon 9 rocket. 

But launching Coverage Above and Beyond will require going above and beyond those already-launched Starlinks. T-Mobile’s service will need the larger second-generation Starlinks that SpaceX plans to start launching on both Falcon 9 and the upcoming Starship.

Musk warned that in the early stages of this service’s rollout, a customer might have to wait for a compatible Starlink to pass overhead before their message could get sent. 

Thursday’s news follows multiple moves by SpaceX to diversify Starlink’s business model beyond providing broadband to especially hard-to-reach homes at $110 a month(Opens in a new window). It’s recently begun selling service to recreational vehicles at $135 a month, without the waitlist residential Starlink customers face, has started selling maritime service at $5,000 a month(Opens in a new window), and has lined up Hawaiian Airlines(Opens in a new window) and the regional-jet airline JSX(Opens in a new window) to provide inflight WiFi via Starlink.

This venture is much less further along than those Starlink spin-offs, and for the most part Musk stayed conservative in his suggestions of what it might allow. 

But the billionaire who wore his “Occupy Mars” T-shirt to this event couldn’t resist answering an audience question about future prospects for this partnership with an especially forward-looking statement: “Well, we’d love to have T-Mobile on Mars.”