Boost Mobile on Mars
SpaceX’s Interplanetary Phone Plans
Last month, SpaceX announced a $17B acquisition of EchoStar, a telecommunications company which owns brands like Boost Mobile and Dish TV. You may remember Boost from their famous “where you at” commercials, which I watched back for you. Fat Joe, old Kanye, and Grandma’s twerking - Boost marketing had something in the 2000s.
SpaceX is now positioned to enter the direct-to-cell wireless market. The spectrum they acquired, called AWS-4 (no relation to Amazon AWS), is referred to as the “golden band” because of its ability to work for both satellite and earth based communication. With SpaceX’s execution and this newly acquired spectrum, SpaceX may one day become the 4th telecom provider (behind Verizon, AT&T, and T Mobile).
They would need to develop or acquire earth based assets (cell towers for example) to become competitive with those 3 players. In the short term, SpaceX is more likely to use their new acquisition to compete with companies like AST SpaceMobile and Globalstar, who has been Apple’s preferred emergency SOS satellite partner since 2022.
But let’s dream about a future in which SpaceX decides they want a piece of the consumer wireless business. Verizon made $80bn last year from wireless service. And has seen that business grow for the 20 consecutive quarters! 5 straight years! If SpaceX adds consumer wireless as revenue line it would give them even more capital to take bigger bets in Space, like Mars.
SpaceX would be a international carrier with Starlink’s 7,600 satellites as its backbone. And I wager they will become the first interplanetary carrier. As they build out infrastructure to support the moon and Mars, Starlink will without a doubt be a part of their communications strategy with off world destinations.
The idea of leaving earth on a Starship, landing on Mars, and having cell service the entire time feels fairly realistic. So all this is to say, someone needs to get me in touch with Fat Joe. I’d like to see if he’s willing to shoot the next Boost Mobile commercial on the surface of the Moon.