EquitiesMarket noteWednesday 30 September 2026, 21:35
AT&T’s chief dismisses SpaceX, but Starlink doubled its customers in a year
John Stankey calls a SpaceX mobile network “not a viable strategy” and bets another $3bn on fibre. Starlink has 12 million subscribers, and four in ten US homes still cannot get fibre.
By The Notebook Desk
Elon Musk’s plan to turn SpaceX into a serious rival for the big telecom companies is “not a viable strategy”, John Stankey, the chief executive of AT&T, told Axios on 29 September. On the same day AT&T signed a deal worth more than $3bn with Corning for fibre and cable over several years, and said that fibre is “three-times faster than satellite services”, RCR Wireless reported. “Nothing beats it,” Stankey said.
Fibre is faster. But speed may not decide the contest. Starlink, the satellite business of SpaceX, already competes for home and business internet customers, and it is growing much faster than the fibre networks of the old telecom companies.
What SpaceX wants
In August, on its first earnings call since it listed in June, SpaceX said that it wants a mobile business too. “The spectrum that we purchased from EchoStar does have terrestrial components, so we definitely intend to build out terrestrial,” said Gwynne Shotwell, its president. She expected SpaceX to win “quite a few” customers from the three large US carriers. The next morning, shares in Verizon and AT&T fell more than 2% before the market opened, and T-Mobile fell 1.3%, Yahoo Finance reported.
SpaceX does not plan to build a network of large towers. It wants to put small cellular base stations next to Starlink dishes on homes and businesses, where satellites alone do not give enough capacity. Stankey says the numbers do not work. “It would cost as much to do that as it would to build a macro network,” he said. He added that “you can’t radiate cellular signals from somebody’s house without their permission, unless somebody changes the law on that”.
The numbers behind the threat
Starlink had 12.0 million subscribers at the end of June, double the 6.0 million a year earlier, SpaceX reported. It added 1.7 million in the second quarter alone. Its connectivity business earned revenue of $4.3bn in the quarter, 66% more than a year earlier.
AT&T is also growing, but more slowly. It added 367,000 fibre customers in the same quarter, and its fibre network reached 38.6 million homes and businesses, the company reported. It plans to reach more than 40 million by the end of this year and more than 60 million by the end of 2030. The two numbers are not a like-for-like comparison: Starlink’s count is global, and AT&T’s is for the US only. But they show the pace of each model.
Where fibre has not reached
For most of its history, fibre in America was slow to arrive. In 2019 it passed about 46.5 million homes, or 37% of the total, according to the Fiber Broadband Association. The pace has since picked up. Builders passed 10.3 million homes in 2024 and a record 11.8 million in 2025, and fibre now passes more than 60% of US households.
That still leaves about four in ten homes without it. For them, the choice is between a dish that works as soon as it is plugged in, and a wait for a company to lay cable down their street. That is the gap Starlink sells into, and it is also why AT&T is spending on fibre so fast.
Not only an American fight
SpaceX sells Starlink in many countries, and phone companies abroad have started to work with it rather than against it. In the second quarter it signed Starlink Mobile partnerships with SoftBank, NTT Docomo and Spark NZ. In the US, T-Mobile already uses Starlink to connect phones to satellites, under an exclusive deal that runs into 2027.
The other carriers are not rejecting satellites either. In May, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon agreed in principle to form a joint venture that would pool their spectrum and “create a unified platform for satellite operators to interconnect with terrestrial mobile networks”, Light Reading reported. In other words, the carriers already plan to buy satellite coverage. The question is whether they will buy it from SpaceX, and on whose terms.
What to watch
SpaceX’s next results will show whether Starlink keeps adding more than 1.5 million subscribers a quarter. The carriers’ joint venture still needs a final agreement. AT&T’s target of more than 40 million fibre locations by December is the test of its own answer. If SpaceX starts to sell phone plans in the US, the fight moves from the homes that fibre has not reached to the customers that all three carriers already have.
Disclosure
This is analysis and opinion, not investment advice.