From CommsDay of 22 October 2026
Our CommsDay Story of the Week is covered by two articles on Starlink in yesterday’s CommsDay. Both are reprined below.
We have chosen these articles because they provide important information, from the top levels in Space X (Elon Musk and President Gwynne Shotwell) of the overall business strategy being pursued, and its implications for terrestrial telecommunications markets and for established supply chains and value chains. Nobody should expect Starlink to fit comfortably into pre-existing value chains. It is a market disruptor, as are all of the Musk enterprises. They seek to extract value up and down supply chains, rather than co-exist with what is currently in place.
In the first article, note the rapid growth of Starlink services in Australia – to 552,000 at the end of 2025 – a growth of 47% over the previous six months. It was not so long before that estimates were being made around the 100,000 to 150,000 mark. The second article, which covers SpaceX’s September quarter earnings webinar, presents the rapid adoption of Starlink worldwide. Services grew by 13% for the quarter and 89% annually.
SpaceX outlines terrestrial mobile network strategy using Starlink customer sites
SpaceX has revealed plans to use existing Starlink broadband installations as sites for terrestrial mobile radios, outlining how it intends to become a major competitor to conventional mobile network operators by combining satellite connectivity with ground-based wireless infrastructure.
Speaking during the company’s third-quarter earnings webcast, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said the strategy involved deploying compact radios at homes, businesses and telecommunications towers already equipped with Starlink terminals.
“We will basically leverage the real estate from Starlink installs and other towers,” she said.
Shotwell said SpaceX expected its S-band spectrum to carry the majority of mobile traffic, while newly acquired 800MHz spectrum
would provide the building penetration required for indoor coverage. She described smaller radios that could be installed at existing Starlink premises, offering the company an alternative to relying entirely on conventional mobile tower infrastructure.
The strategy follows SpaceX’s October agreement to acquire a nationwide portfolio of up to 14MHz of paired spectrum in the US 800MHz band. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals.
SpaceX has not announced plans to deploy an equivalent terrestrial mobile network in Australia. However, the approach could have implications for Telstra, Optus and TPG if the company ultimately pursues a similar strategy internationally.
Starlink is already Australia’s second-largest fixed broadband access network after NBN Co, with 552,000 retail services at December 2025, according to the ACCC. That was up 47% from 375,000 six months earlier.
HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS IN CONNECTIVITY REVENUE: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk suggested the company’s combination of satellite and terrestrial infrastructure could eventually support annual connectivity revenues running into hundreds of billions of
dollars.
“I can say we do see a clear path to several hundred billion dollars a year in connectivity revenue,” Musk told analysts. “I think we probably should do a longer presentation on the game plan for Starlink connectivity and why we think it will ultimately be a business that generates several hundred billion dollars in revenue a year, because you are missing some of the pieces that we know about internally.”
Musk did not specify a timeframe for achieving the forecast, which compares with SpaceX’s current quarterly connectivity revenues of US$5.25bn.
The company is increasingly positioning Starlink as a provider of both fixed broadband and mobile connectivity, with direct-to-device services already expanding through partnerships with terrestrial operators.
STARLINK MOBILE REACHES 22 MILLION USERS: SpaceX disclosed that Starlink Mobile had surpassed 22 million monthly users at the end of September, an increase of 37% from the previous quarter.
The service expanded into additional markets during the quarter, including Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kazakhstan and Costa Rica, through arrangements with local mobile operators. The user figure refers to people accessing Starlink Mobile through participating operators rather than customers subscribing directly to SpaceX.
The company plans to begin launching its next-generation Mobile V2 satellites aboard Starship during 2027, with the integration of its recently acquired US spectrum expected to support expanded services from early 2028. SpaceX said it had received Federal Communications Commission approval to launch 15,000 Mobile V2 satellites.
The growth of satellite-to-mobile services has particular relevance for Australia following the passage of legislation establishing the Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation, which provides a framework for extending basic mobile coverage beyond conventional terrestrial networks.
Looking further ahead, Musk predicted that SpaceX could increase the bandwidth of its Starlink constellation approximately 100-fold within three years. He suggested the constellation could eventually comprise around 100,000 satellites, each with substantially greater capacity than current-generation spacecraft.
The forecast goes well beyond the company’s presently authorised satellite deployments and would depend on additional regulatory approvals and a major expansion of its launch capabilities.
Musk also suggested demand for communications bandwidth could increase a thousandfold over three to five years as artificial intelligence agents, autonomous vehicles and robots generated increasing volumes of network traffic
Grahame Lynch
Starlink targets mid-2027 for major broadband performance boost as subscriber numbers surge
SpaceX expects customers to begin experiencing sustained improvements in Starlink broadband speeds and latency by mid-2027 as it deploys hundreds of new V3 satellites, following a quarter in which its global consumer subscriber base reached 13.6 million.
SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told the company’s third-quarter earnings webcast that a few hundred third-generation satellites would need to be operating before the performance improvements became consistently noticeable to customers.
“I think we’ll need a few hundred V3 satellites for people to really feel the impact,” she said. Shotwell explained that the benefits from an
initial small deployment would be intermittent, as individual satellites passed through the coverage areas of customers. “A few
hundred satellites and I think we can achieve that by mid next year,” she said.
The timetable follows SpaceX’s first revenue-generating Starship mission, which placed 26 V3 satellites into orbit.
CEO Elon Musk said the mission had added approximately 26Tbps of aggregate downlink capacity to the Starlink constellation, equivalent to the capacity added by ten Falcon 9 launches carrying earlier-generation satellites. He said the Starship vehicle had been loaded to only around half its potential capacity during the mission.
SpaceX expects to ramp up Starship launches during 2027, with the longer-term objective of operating the vehicle twice weekly or more frequently by the end of that year.
The company said future Starship missions could deliver more than 20 times the downlink capacity added by current Falcon 9 Starlink launches. The capacity expansion could strengthen Starlink’s position in Australia, where it is already the second-largest ϐixed broadband access network after NBN Co. According to the ACCC, Starlink had 552,000 Australian retail services at December 2025, up 47% in six months. The company competes particularly strongly in regional and remote areas, where NBN Co provides ϐixed wireless and satellite services.
GLOBAL SUBSCRIBERS APPROACH 14 MILLION: SpaceX reported that Starlink ended September with 13.6 million consumer broadband subscribers worldwide, compared with 12 million in June and 7.2 million a year earlier. The addition of 1.6 million subscribers during the quarter represented growth of 13.3%, while the annual increase was approximately 89%.
The company said growth was particularly strong in developed markets, with production of its new V5 customer terminals helping to ease equipment availability constraints.
However, the financial results revealed that Starlink’s average consumer revenue per user had declined substantially over the past year. Monthly consumer ARPU fell from US$83 in the September 2025 quarter to US$69, a reduction of approximately 17%. ARPU nevertheless increased 5% from US$66 in the June quarter, which SpaceX attributed to a favourable customer mix.
Despite the annual decline in ARPU, consumer connectivity revenues increased 57% year-on-year to US$3.12bn, reϐlecting the substantial expansion in subscriber numbers. Total connectivity revenue, including enterprise and government services, increased 69% to US$5.25bn.
Connectivity operating income nearly doubled to US$2.37bn, while adjusted EBITDA rose 82% to US$3.5bn.
AVIATION BUSINESS BUILDS SUBSTANTIAL ORDER PIPELINE: SpaceX also disclosed that Starlink had secured connectivity contracts covering approximately 12,000 aircraft worldwide, representing almost a quarter of the addressable aviation market
according to the company.
More than 3,800 aircraft had been equipped with Starlink by the end of September, leaving over 8,000 contracted aircraft awaiting installation.
Shotwell said SpaceX had quadrupled production rates for aviation equipment since the beginning of 2026 and expected to double them again before the end of the year. The company has agreements with three of the four largest US airlines and is expanding its international customer base.
During the September quarter, Lufthansa, Swiss, Copa Airlines, Korean Air and Austrian Airlines were among the carriers to operate their first Starlink-equipped aircraft.
Enterprise and government connectivity revenues increased 91% year-on-year to US$2.13bn, supported by aviation demand and growth in the StarShield government communications business.
Shotwell suggested enterprise and government connectivity could eventually each generate more revenue than Starlink’s consumer broadband operation.
Overall, SpaceX reported third-quarter revenue of US$14.6bn, up 161% from a year earlier, with net income of US$4.4bn and adjusted EBITDA of US$8.8bn. Its superintelligence AI division generated US$7.56bn in quarterly revenue, surpassing connectivity as SpaceX’s largest revenue-generating segment.
Grahame Lynch
IN TODAY’S COMMSDAY (Friday 23 October 2026)
TPG Telecom has gone public with long-simmering complaints about Aussie Broadband-owned Symbio’s alleged role in facilitating scam calls, claiming that the wholesaler was associated with almost all the scam traffic blocked on its Vodafone network over a 12-month period.
Datagrid is contemplating additional potential cable landing stations for the initial route of its Tasman Ring Network subcable project beyond Torquay, Victoria, an application for a marine route survey suggests.
Ad-supported streaming services accounted for more than half of Australia’s subscription video growth during FY26, according to Telsyte, as consumers increasingly turned to cheaper plans and bundled offers to manage entertainment spending.
Optus is planning to begin deploying Intelligent Beamforming capabilities in the first half of 2027, following a trial earlier this month across nine 5G Standalone base stations in two clusters in Sydney and Melbourne.
NBN Co’s extension of NBN full fibre via FTTP to another 19,000 homes and business in 70 Victorian towns in conjunction with Connecting Victoria appears to overbuild sections of a fibre network being built by Gippsland-based telco Rural Fibre Co.
AST SpaceMobile plans to introduce intermittent satellite-to-mobile broadband coverage in five countries before the end of 2026, with Australia and New Zealand absent from its initial rollout plans despite earlier collaboration agreements with local operators.
Forty years after the establishment of the .au domain in March 1986, the number of registered domains using the namespace reached 4,387,430 as of the end of June, according to .au Domain Administration’s latest annual report.
Firmus Technologies has confirmed that it does not expect to contract the full capacity of Tasmania’s planned Bernacchi-1 submarine cable, leaving substantial bandwidth available for other telecommunications and enterprise customers.
SpaceX’s Starlink is now earning just under 3% of New Zealand’s qualified telecommunications service revenue, according to the Commerce Commission.
New Zealand law firm Chapman Tripp has commissioned two reports from economic consulting firms which argue that the proposed radio access network joint venture between One NZ and 2degrees would substantially lessen competition in the nation’s mobile market.
NVIDIA and Nokia have announced a series of milestones in bringing GPU-based computing into telecommunications networks, including what they describe as the world’s first AI-RAN call on a commercial mobile network.
Viasat has launched a demonstration satellite to test the use of geostationary networks to provide continuous communications with spacecraft in low Earth orbit, under a US$81 million NASA program.
Toshiba has launched a quantum-safe networking platform designed to support the deployment of quantum encryption technologies across existing telecommunications and data centre networks.
Equinix has opened a Sydney facility allowing enterprise customers to test liquid-cooled AI infrastructure under production conditions before committing to large-scale deployments.
1414 Degrees said it now owns 100% of the Aurora Energy Precinct near Port Augusta, South Australia, acquiring the remaining 50% share.
SpaceX will be able to add to its spectrum arsenal, after the US Federal Communications Commission has signed off on its acquisition of Tristar unpaired AWS-3 licences in the 1695-1710 MHz range across 62 counties in eight states.
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