From CommsDay of 22 June 2026
Our Story of the Week is from Monday’s CommsDay. It is a news analysis aricle by Grahame Lynch, rather than about breaking news. We have selected this article as our Story of the Week because it follows on from Grahame’s analysis that we republished last week of the SpaceX prospectus lodged with the US SEC for the public share float. The latest article is a thoughtful assessment of the implications of SpaceX’s ambitions for Starlink in the global mobile services market, and the potential for substantial disruption of that market at all levels. LEO satellite operations will not be just one more additional consideration in a complex market situation. With Starlink leading the charge, they will disrupt current supply and value chains, and investment in terrestrial infrastructure. National digital sovereignty will be tested, and possibly further undermined. These matters are not ones that should engender panic and alarm, but they do need very serious consideration and more public discourse. As the article reprinted below suggests, we need to see SpaceX’s ambitions as fundamental changes to all related ecosystems.
(On the point about the practical meaning of national digital sovereignty in the age of global interconnectivity and interdependence – this is a matter worth serious and protracted thought. The editors of the Journal certainly think so, and give some consideration to the subject in the editorial of the June issue which will be published next week.)
ANALYSIS BY GRAHAME LYNCH
The unbridled ambition of SpaceX
Here is one way to think about SpaceX.
At a market value of around US$2.1 trillion, or A$3.2 trillion, it is worth about US$253 for every human being alive. That is A$387 a head.
That is more than six times global annual mobile ARPU of about US$40. Not bad for a company whose Starlink business has about 10 million customers on a planet of 8.3 billion people.
Clearly, investors are not valuing SpaceX on what Starlink is. They are valuing it on what it might become.
The prospectus is not shy about the ambition.
“Based on the total number of connected devices globally and the mobile ARPU, we estimate the Starlink Mobile market opportunity to be $740 billion,” SpaceX says.
SpaceX reported 2025 revenue of US$18.67 billion. Connectivity contributed US$11.39 billion, or 61% of the total. Consumer connectivity was the biggest line at US$7.21 billion, ahead of enterprise and government connectivity at US$4.18 billion.
The prospectus leans heavily on better future satellites. But physics can sober even the most optimistic PowerPoint.
As William Webb and Dennis Roberson note in new book Beyond The Tower, currently envisaged direct-to-device satellite capacity may still be about one hundredth of the capacity per square kilometre of a rural 5G network. That matters because Starlink Mobile is not pitching itself as a niche rural service. SpaceX says it expects “to compete to provide the preferred connectivity experience no matter where” customers are located, including “rural, suburban, urban, and remote areas.”
So how does a satellite-first service become the preferred mobile service in suburbs and cities?
The answer probably begins with Wi-Fi. Most people spend most of their lives indoors. Inside homes and offices, the mobile
network is often not doing the heavy lifting anyway. Wi-Fi is.
That makes Starlink’s fixed broadband base—over half a million premises in Australia alone— more than a broadband base. It is also a potential mobile offload footprint. And of course all those potential customers in urban environments already likely have a fixed broadband connection.
The harder bit comes when people leave the house. Once users are moving through urban and suburban environments, the physics obviously favour terrestrial mobile networks over satellites. Which leads to the obvious conclusion. Starlink is more likely to become one of the world’s largest thick MVNOs than a pure satellite mobile carrier.
And telcos will help it.
They already fall over themselves to partner with Starlink, often for thin margins.
The brand is too strong and the fear of missing out is too great.
This is where the SpaceX market value becomes a weapon. Take TPG Telecom. At a market value of roughly US$5 billion, TPG could theoretically be bought for about 0.23% of SpaceX’s value. Australia accounts for roughly 5% of Starlink’s fixed broadband base. Apply the same logic across Starlink’s other major markets and the arithmetic quickly becomes uncomfortable. It could buy Boost Mobile—the 4th biggest national MNO in the United States—for just US$31bn.
Indeed, SpaceX could buy an MNO in its ten major markets at this type of valuation and dilute its market cap by a mere 4% or so!
It probably will not. Regulators would have a say. But that is not the point. The point is that SpaceX has the balance sheet, audacity and investor licence to bend telecoms market outcomes in ways normal telcos cannot.
The hyperscalers have already shown how this game works. Amazon is helping fund fibre infrastructure in Australia through Swoop and XenithIG while preparing its own LEO satellite network, which will collectively take AWS traffic on-net. Google is building submarine cables into Australia. Microsoft is a foundation customer for domestic trunk fibre builds.
Even when hyperscalers do not own networks, they increasingly shape what gets built, where it gets built and what price they pay.
SpaceX is likely thinking along similar lines. As a thick MVNO, strategic partner or even equity investor, it can push terrestrial mobile costs close to build or wholesale cost while keeping the customer relationship and the upside.
But Starlink Mobile is unlikely to be just another mobile operator. It is the connectivity layer for something much bigger. The easy assumption is that Musk wants to build a global telecommunications company. The prospectus suggests something considerably more ambitious.
Alongside Starlink, SpaceX sold investors on X, Grok, payments and artiϐicial intelligence. The company estimates a US$740 billion opportunity for Starlink Mobile. But that is dwarfed by the opportunities it identifies elsewhere. It estimates a US$2.4 trillion market for AI infrastructure, a US$760 billion market for consumer AI subscriptions, a US$600 billion digital advertising market and points to a digital economy expected to reach US$22.7 trillion next year.
Read those numbers carefully and something becomes apparent. Connectivity is not the business plan. It is the customer acquisition strategy.
Starlink brings the customer on board. Mobile keeps them engaged. X captures attention. Grok becomes the AI assistant. X Money handles transactions. Enterprise AI tools generate recurring business revenue.
In that world, connectivity becomes less important as a profit centre and more important as a control point.
Traditional telcos tend to view mobile, broadband, payments, advertising and AI as separate markets. SpaceX appears to view them as components of a single ecosystem. That is why pigeonholing Starlink’s proposed direct-to-device service as a mere universal service input for the major telcos gets the relationship the wrong way around. Investors are not valuing Starlink as a niche satellite operator or a junior
partner to terrestrial carriers. They are valuing the possibility that SpaceX could become the first company to combine global connectivity, artificial intelligence, payments, media and digital identity into a single platform operating at planetary scale.
IN TODAY’S COMMSDAY (Friday 26 June 2026)
Swoop has agreed to sell its partly constructed Melbourne fibre network to Xenith Infrastructure Group for $11 million in cash, handing the Singapore-headquartered infrastructure investor a major expansion of the metro presence it established through its acquisition of Fibre Path.
The telecom sector should move early to counter likely conspiracy theories about 6G by “prebunking” false narratives before they gain traction, according to Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association consultant Matt Evans.
NBN Co has received industry recognition for autonomous capabilities used to manage atmospheric ducting and other interference on its fixed wireless network, which serves about 800,000 premises.
Former Ventia telecommunications chief Mark Ralston will replace Dean Banks as the infrastructure services company’s managing director and group CEO from 1 September. Ralston has held leadership roles at Ventia for more than a decade and is currently group executive for defence and social infrastructure. Before taking up that position in October, he led the company’s telecommunications business.
The Department of Defence has approached the market for Android mobile devices capable of connecting to 5G and Wi-Fi networks for use in land-domain activities.
Network orchestration provider ActivePort and telecommunications software company FirstWave Cloud Technology have partnered to launch a gateway providing enterprises and government organisations with secure access to GPU infrastructure.
Data centres are expected to become a significant contributor to growth in electricity demand through to 2050, according to the Australian Energy Market Operator’s 2026 Integrated System Plan.
The GSMA has called for emerging satellite direct-to-device providers to face comparable regulatory obligations to mobile operators when delivering functionally equivalent services.
Communications platform-as-a-service provider Bandwidth has launched a capability allowing artificial intelligence agents to provision and deploy services on its cloud communications platform.
Global telecommunications revenue rose 3.5% to US$1.85 trillion in 2025, but near decade-high profitability was driven substantially by restrained capital spending, workforce reductions and merger activity rather than a broad acceleration in underlying demand.
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