The SpaceX S-1 filing is their public declaration that the traditional telecommunications business model has entered a terminal phase. By valuing its connectivity segment opportunity against a $1.6 trillion Total Addressable Market, SpaceX is not signaling a partnership with telcos but their replacement, to the fullest extent that physics allows. This transition may not be completed in 12 or 24 months, but the 10-year ambition is clear.Faced with this orbital expansion, the industry is frantically seeking a counterweight, and market sentiment has converged on AST SpaceMobile as the only viable alternative. It is time to examine what AST SpaceMobile brings to the table in terms of its corporate strategy, technological architecture, and partnership framework, and to assess whether it offers telcos a path to maintaining their relevance.

As a follow-up to our ongoing tracking of the telecommunication market, the structural contraction we’ve been mapping is visibly accelerating. The BT Group recently announced plans to eliminate up to 40% of its workforce by 2030, representing approximately 27,500 jobs. This follows a broader pattern across the global sector: Verizon recently executed a $2 billion restructuring program involving 15,000 corporate roles, while T-Mobile filed to reduce its corporate management layer in Bellevue, Washington. Across the entire ecosystem, operators and their supply chains are systematically reducing headcount.The telecommunications labor market is locked into a structural contraction that will continue at least through this decade, and the reasons have nothing to do with AI or any technological shift.

The financial markets are currently parsing the implications of SpaceX’s proposed $1.75tn IPO valuation. While much of the initial retail focus has centered on the company’s interplanetary ambitions, institutional investors are scrutinizing a far more grounded thesis detailed in the May 2026 S-1 filing. The prospectus outlines a strategic pivot from a launch-and-logistics provider to a vertically integrated global telecommunications and compute utility.At 94 times its projected 2025 consolidated revenue of $18.67bn, SpaceX’s valuation represents a significant departure from traditional aerospace and telecommunications multiples. The justification rests on the company’s definition of a staggering $28.5tn Total Addressable Market. By partitioning this TAM into space logistics ($370bn), global connectivity ($1.6tn), and AI infrastructure ($26.5tn), the prospectus argues that the historical separation between the physical transport of data and the compute layer is converging, and the company intends to capture the margins of both.

To appreciate the significance of this development, it is helpful to look back at the previous defining era of telecommunications. In the early 2010s, as smartphones became ubiquitous and app economies exploded, the metric of value for both carriers and consumers shifted dramatically. This was the era of the gigabyte. Subscriptions, usage caps, and pricing tiers were all defined by data consumption. Telcos established the price per gigabyte as their primary billing KPI, monetizing the massive demand for mobile internet, video streaming, and app-based services. For a decade, the “GB per month” was the yardstick of digital life.

This week at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference, executive leadership from the major U.S. wireless carriers and AST SpaceMobile presented their outlooks on the direct-to-device satellite market. The public consensus among the telecom CEOs framed orbital connectivity as a strictly complementary technology rather than a disruptive threat.Verizon CEO Dan Schulman stated that for the foreseeable future, satellite will remain a complementary service to the carriers. He noted that terrestrial capacity is 100 to 1,000 times more efficient than satellite in urban and suburban areas. T-Mobile CEO Srinivasan Gopalan doubled down on this view, noting that satellite traffic currently accounts for just 0.0002% of T-Mobile’s total network usage. Gopalan also dismissed the potential threat of a D2D provider launching an MVNO to compete directly with carriers, arguing that it would not add incremental total addressable market. AT&T CEO John Stankey similarly described satellite as a natural extension of the network, acknowledging it currently handles a small percentage of total network traffic.

Look at the image above. On the left is your current human subscriber. For the last two decades, you have sold them GBs per month, fought over marginal ARPU increases, and watched every single app try to commoditize your network. That race to the bottom didn’t end up really well.On the right is your brand-new customer.Figure just ran a live drill in which a human intern competed against its Figure 03 humanoid, “Bob,” to see who could sort and categorize more packages. The result? The human lost the moment they had to step away to go to the bathroom. F.03 just kept working.

As I have consistently discussed, the sudden explosion of thousands of autonomous, AI-powered voice applications has pushed Twilio’s orchestration platform into the center stage of the Inference Economy.Honestly, it feels almost stupid that a historically high-latency, expensive, frequently untested, and spam-ridden legacy voice channel like Twilio VOIP is fundamentally beating the global telecom operators who have literally owned and operated this infrastructure for 150 years.Unfortunately, this is just a damning reflection of how little the telecom establishment understands about AI economics. How many times can a single industry lose its core service to outsiders?"

If I were a Tier-1 Telco executive today, I would be deeply concerned about the long-term revenue damage Starlink will inflict. And yes, it will inflict damage, because you don’t plan for tens of thousands of satellites in orbit just to rescue a few stranded hikers on Mount Everest. That is the truth, whether the industry admits it out loud or not.But trying to block Musk, or believing he will passively accept his fate as a submissive 3GPP radio vendor, is an absolute delusion. Forming a defensive cartel to isolate SpaceX does two highly dangerous things for legacy carriers. First, it moves the attention from the Real Problem, which is Earthbound CapEx and Flat Revenue, and secondly, It Wakes a Dragon and Triggers Asymmetric Retaliation.

The military is moving from communications as a support function to communications as an operating layer. In the older model, networks connected headquarters, bases, command rooms, ships, vehicles, and troops. In the new model, networks connect drones, sensors, logistics systems, cyber platforms, autonomous vehicles, cloud environments, AI models, identity systems, command software, and industrial supply chains. The network is no longer outside the mission; it is now inside the mission.

On May 14, 2026, the three largest U.S. carriers announced a joint venture to pool spectrum for a unified direct-to-device (D2D) satellite platform. While the public narrative centers on rural coverage, this is a defensive restructuring of telecom power.Satellite connectivity is scaling aggressively. SpaceX’s V3 satellites and Starship launches will soon drive a 10x capacity increase, while recent regulatory shifts have elevated Starlink from a vendor to a sovereign spectrum holder. Concurrently, Amazon’s acquisition of Globalstar gives the hyperscaler direct access to Apple’s D2D consumer market. Far beyond eliminating dead zones, this JV marks a high-stakes power struggle between legacy Tier-1 operators and vertically integrated space titans for the control of next-generation communications.

A Tier One telco threw me an “acid test” question today. The question was much sharper: “With around 10,000 satellites in orbit today, how many fixed broadband households can Starlink actually support? 20 million, 30 million, 100 million?” That question is important because it is not about coverage but about damage. Fixed and cable players do not lose sleep because Starlink can draw a coverage map over the planet; they lose sleep if Starlink can take paying broadband households at scale without destroying its own quality.

For the better part of three decades, the boardroom tables of the world’s leading network vendors, such as Nokia, Ericsson, and the politically exiled Huawei, have been dominated by a very specific archetype: the career radio engineer. These were executives who spoke the deterministic language of spectrum propagation, massive MIMO antennas, and baseband processing. Their mandate was to build hardware that enables telecommunications operators to transmit more gigabytes of consumer data over the air at a lower cost per bit. Something that requires an extreme level of engineering knowledge and experience.

For a decade, “Becoming a Utility” was the ultimate slur in the telecom boardroom. If you wanted to offend a Telco C-suite, you just needed to say: “You are nothing more than a Utility”.But in 2026, the irony is really sad as Telcos should be begging for that utility status. While global operators grind out a stagnant 4% revenue growth, power utilities have positioned themselves as the AI revolution’s feedstock, surging at 8% their revenues in 2025 or double the pace of the so-called “TechCos.”The industry remains stuck in an echo chamber of Haters dismissing leadership as incompetent, Vendors selling silver-bullet products to fix structural rot, and Denialists claiming tech agility on 2% revenue growth. To find the exit, we must stop the noise and address the five-dimensional trap: Regulatory, Technological, Market, Consumer, and Cultural, that keeps 300 intelligent Telco´s management teams producing identical mediocre results.

The data center industry is hitting a massive physical wall: the power grid simply cannot keep up with the exploding demand for AI compute. Expanding traditional, centralized server farms is slow and expensive, currently hampered by a staggering 2,600 GW backlog of projects awaiting utility connections. To bypass this gridlock, NVIDIA has partnered with smart-panel maker SPAN and homebuilder PulteGroup to launch XFRA. In plain English, they are bypassing the commercial utility queue entirely by deploying enterprise-grade AI data centers directly in residential backyards, running on the spare electricity from everyday homes.

The data center industry is hitting a massive physical wall: the power grid simply cannot keep up with the exploding demand for AI compute. Expanding traditional, centralized server farms is slow and expensive, currently hampered by a staggering 2,600 GW backlog of projects awaiting utility connections. To bypass this gridlock, NVIDIA has partnered with smart-panel maker SPAN and homebuilder PulteGroup to launch XFRA. In plain English, they are bypassing the commercial utility queue entirely by deploying enterprise-grade AI data centers directly in residential backyards, running on the spare electricity from everyday homes.

Amazon's acquisition of Globalstar for approximately $10.8 billion marks a significant strategic entry into the direct-to-device (D2D) satellite communications market. The deal grants Amazon access to Globalstar's mobile satellite services spectrum licenses and operational infrastructure, complementing its existing Amazon Leo broadband initiative. With D2D technology transitioning from proof-of-concept to early commercial scale and the ecosystem rapidly maturing—evidenced by 96 smartphones now offering D2D capabilities—Amazon positions itself to capitalize on a burgeoning multi-billion-dollar market. The acquisition provides immediate spectrum control, an operational network, and reduced integration risks with device manufacturers, while a partnership arrangement ensures continued satellite services for Apple products. Industry analysts assess the strategic implications for Amazon's return on investment and the broader competitive landscape within mobile satellite services.

Direct-to-Device satellite technology is fundamentally transforming global telecommunications by integrating low Earth orbit constellations with terrestrial cellular networks. The LEO satellite market exceeded $8 billion in early 2026, driven by significant capital investment and declining launch costs that have improved deployment economics. Major telecommunications operators are establishing partnerships with constellation developers through spectrum leasing and revenue-sharing agreements. Critical standardization through 3GPP Release 18 and 19 has enabled native NTN integration into smartphone chipsets, eliminating the need for proprietary external hardware. Aggressive LEO deployments by operators like SpaceX and AST SpaceMobile are systematically expanding connectivity to previously underserved remote regions, positioning satellite-to-phone services as a scalable, reliable extension of traditional cellular infrastructure.

Amazon's $11.57 billion acquisition of Globalstar represents a strategic entry into the satellite broadband market and a direct challenge to Starlink's dominance. The deal grants Amazon access to Globalstar's mobile-satellite spectrum, a scarce resource difficult for new entrants to obtain, along with existing infrastructure and 24 operational satellites with plans for expansion to 54. Notably, Amazon inherits Globalstar's established partnership with Apple, which had invested $1.5 billion in the company. Through this acquisition, Amazon Leo, its low-earth orbit network, will leverage Globalstar's spectrum and infrastructure to deliver satellite connectivity to Apple devices. This strategic positioning allows Amazon to tap into Apple's satellite communication roadmap while competing against SpaceX's Starlink in the emerging satellite broadband sector.

The Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite market is experiencing rapid expansion as Amazon and Starlink compete to reshape global connectivity. LEO satellites, orbiting closer to Earth than traditional geostationary systems, deliver superior performance through reduced latency and improved reliability—critical advantages for applications including in-flight WiFi, streaming, and real-time communication. Airlines are increasingly prioritizing connectivity as an essential passenger amenity rather than premium service. The competitive landscape has evolved beyond internet speed alone, now emphasizing digital ecosystems, cloud integration, artificial intelligence capabilities, and strategic airline partnerships. This market growth is driven by escalating demand for uninterrupted connectivity in remote and mobile environments, positioning LEO satellite infrastructure as pivotal infrastructure for future telecommunications.

Amazon is preparing to launch its Leo satellite internet service in 2026, positioning itself as a major competitor to SpaceX's Starlink in the low-Earth-orbit communications market. CEO Andy Jassy announced that Leo will deliver superior performance, claiming it will be six times better than existing alternatives for uplink performance and twice as effective for downlink capabilities. The company has already secured significant partnerships with Delta Airlines, JetBlue, AT&T, Vodafone, DirecTV, and NASA, demonstrating strong commercial interest. Amazon aims to provide global high-speed internet at affordable prices, with commercial service launching within months. Despite previous project delays, Amazon remains committed to establishing Leo as a leading competitor in the satellite internet industry.