MobileX and Boost Mobile founder Peter Adderton (pictured) rebuffed the reported view of T-Mobile US CEO Srini Gopalan that Starlink poses little threat to mobile operators.

Financial Times (FT) reported Gopalan is struggling to see what consumer problem satellite services solve by entering the mobile market.

“You’ve got to ask the question of ‘What is the gap in the market that they’re looking to serve?'” he reportedly said, adding a broader network is “clearly not” what would draw customers to a new mobile service.

In a post on LinkedIn, Adderton said Gopalan’s position misses the point entirely.

“I always find it funny when wireless executives ask, ‘Why would a customer switch? It’s clearly not because they have a broader cellular network,'” he said. “That’s exactly the point.”

He argued Starlink is not trying to out-build T-Mobile’s network, but to offer something terrestrial operators cannot easily replicate: a single service combining terrestrial and satellite connectivity, spanning cities, rural areas, highways, mountains and water, with plans to eventually extend worldwide.

Adderton drew a comparison to Uber, arguing consumers did not choose the service because it built better roads, but because it created a better experience on infrastructure which already existed.

He explained the mistake operators make is assuming customers are shopping for another mobile network, when they may instead be shopping for connectivity which “just works”.

Adderton also took aim at the broader response from operator executives to Starlink’s mobile ambitions, suggesting a coordinated messaging effort.

“Seems every MNO CEO in the JV got the same script and, credit where credit’s due, they’re sticking to it beautifully,” he wrote on X. “Their PR teams must be very proud. Not a rogue talking point in sight.”

Plans
Gopalan’s reported comments were made before Elon Musk confirmed SpaceX plans to build a US mobile service.

On SpaceX’s Q2 earnings call, Musk said Starlink’s terrestrial mobile network would likely offer better connectivity and higher bandwidth than what is currently available from mobile operators.

SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said she expects to draw a significant number of customers from AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, with Starlink Mobile satellites launching in 2027 and services due to commence by the year-end.

Gopalan told FT satellite technology would remain “complementary” to existing networks rather than a replacement.

T-Mobile is one of several operators which holds satellite access deals with SpaceX to supplement rural coverage.

FT reported Gopalan also addressed T-Mobile’s growth strategy, stating it aims to more than double its broadband customer base to 20 million within four years and grow its rural market share beyond its current 24%.

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The European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA) named Spain-based Hispasat as the lead contractor for its IRIS2 European satellite network, handing it a budget of more than €1.6 billion.

Owned by Spanish defence company Indra Group, Hispasat has been charged with providing antenna infrastructure, control systems and ground network connectivity for IRIS2.

It will also lead the development of the system’s very low Earth orbit layer, operating at altitudes below 750km. This layer is designed to provide direct connectivity services to mobile devices and for IoT, providing access for European startups and SMEs.

The agreement further guarantees Hispasat access to non-geostationary orbits in regions of high strategic interest, complementing its range of capabilities and geographic coverage.

To that end, Hispasat has committed an investment of up to €600 million in exchange for obtaining “exploitation rights” in regions of high strategic interest and commercial value for the business it already operates through its geostationary fleet.

The award comes following talks between the EC, ESA and SpaceRISE, a satellite consortium formed between Eutelsat, SES and Hispasat.

Luis Mayo, CEO of Hispasat, noted the agreement helps it strengthen its position among the leaders of the European space industry and in its main business areas.

The IRIS2 programme will deploy a network of 330 new LEO satellites and 12 medium earth orbit (MEO) birds, with initial services due to begin in 2030. In total, €15.6 billion will be invested in the project, with €11.6 billion coming from public funds and €4 billion from the SpaceRISE consortium.

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Zayo partnered with Nvidia to build out critical network capacity aimed at supporting AI factories, as the digital infrastructure provider looks to close a widening gap between compute demand and available network bandwidth.

Through the collaboration, Zayo is constructing more than 8,000 miles of new long-haul fibre across fast-growing AI corridors, alongside a significant expansion of capacity across its existing infrastructure.

The work spans 24 total routes, comprising six new long-haul routes, 10 overbuilds of existing network across high-demand markets, and eight existing fibre routes.

Nvidia is a Zayo customer and will have significant access to capacity across all the new and overbuilt routes.

Zayo CEO Steve Smith stated AI is reshaping where and how network infrastructure needs to be built across the US, adding the company has invested heavily in modelling where AI-driven demand will emerge so it can expand infrastructure ahead of that demand.

He said Zayo is combining decades of experience building and operating large-scale network infrastructure with Nvidia’s accelerated computing capabilities to support AI connectivity across North America.

Zayo said the expansion is designed to benefit the broader AI ecosystem beyond the largest hyperscalers, including neoclouds, frontier model developers, and enterprises across sectors such as healthcare, finance, and manufacturing.

Over the past 18 months, Zayo has expanded its AI-focused network buildout to more than 15,000 route miles across North America.

Its recently completed acquisition of Crown Castle’s fibre and small cell assets added 90,000 metro route miles and 40,000 on-net enterprise locations, strengthening the company’s metro density for AI inference workloads.

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SpaceX outlined plans to build a massive semiconductor fabrication facility in the US state of Texas, with an initial investment of more than $16.8 billion designed to support growing demand for AI chips across its satellite and space operations.

Texas governor Greg Abbott announced the first phase of the Terafab project, which is expected to create 3,000 jobs and has been backed by a $30 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant. The project also qualifies for incentives through the state’s Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation programme.

The planned 100-million-square-foot site in Grimes County, Texas, will combine logic, memory and advanced packaging under one roof, enabling SpaceX to consolidate parts of the semiconductor production chain as it seeks to avoid constraints in global chip supply.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stated the facility will help the company produce AI chips at scale for use on Earth and in space. The project is expected to support future hardware requirements across Starlink, Starship and broader space infrastructure.

Abbott stated Texas was selected because of its business climate, workforce, infrastructure and logistics advantages. Local officials said the development could provide a long-term economic boost for Grimes County and Southeast Texas, with roles spanning engineering, technical operations and plant management.

The investment deepens SpaceX’s presence in Texas, where it already operates its Starbase headquarters, a site in Cameron County and a Starlink manufacturing facility in Bastrop.

SpaceX is pitching Terafab as part of a wider push to secure in-house chip capacity for next-generation aerospace, connectivity and AI workloads, as demand for customised compute grows across the company’s satellite broadband and launch businesses.

Intel also signed up for the project by working with SpaceX, Tesla and xAI to help refactor silicon fab technology at Terafab and support an ambition to produce 1-terrawatt of compute annually for AI and robotics workloads.

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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (pictured) highlighted an ambitious growth plan for the company’s Starlink broadband service, forecasting a hundredfold increase in total delivered bandwidth driven by its next-generation V3 satellite constellation.

Speaking on SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company, Musk and president Gwynne Shotwell detailed a long-term strategy to capture a majority of global internet traffic in accessible markets.

To support the push, the operator recently applied to the Federal Communications Commission seeking approval to deploy up to 100,000 low-Earth-orbit satellites for its V3 satellite network, supplementing the approximately 9,600 broadband V2 birds currently in orbit.

SpaceX’s Starlink broadband customers doubled to 12 million year-over-year despite price increases for the service. Starlink ended Q2 with service availability in 167 markets “with some very exciting announcements coming soon,” he said.

Those numbers are the tip of the iceberg, according to Musk.  

“This is a big deal,” he said. “It’s kind of hard for people to wrap their minds around this, but it’s not out of the question that at some point, Starlink will deliver a majority of the world’s internet, at least in countries where we’re allowed to operate.”

Musk stated individual Starlink V3 satellites deliver roughly 10 times the performance of V2 models. While V2 hardware typically maxes out between 100Mb/s and 450Mb/s depending on network congestion, the V3 constellation deployment is designed to unlock gigabit-class downlinks for standard end users.

Musk stated a V3 Starlink bird will launch on Starship flight 14, but this time they’ll enter an “operational orbit.” Last month’s Starship flight sent up a batch of V3 satellites as part of a suborbital test.

“The Starlink V3 satellite is about an order of magnitude more capable than the Starlink V2 satellite, which was already a very capable satellite,” he explained. “And we expect to launch about an order of magnitude more Starlink V3 satellites.

Combined with plans to launch 10 times as many V3 birds, the upgraded constellation is projected to increase overall bandwidth capacity by two orders of magnitude. He emphasised that even if revenue per bit decreased by 90%, the expansion will still drive a tenfold increase in Starlink revenue.

“It’s certainly a bold claim and one that contravenes the company’s prior statements that Starlink was most appropriate for rural users,” Quilty Space founder and CEO Chris Quilty told Mobile World Live. “Starlink V3 will provide a 10x boost, reaching 8Pb/s of downlink capacity, but aggregate network capacity is a misleading metric because capacity is geographically distributed while demand is geographically concentrated.”

AI compute capacity
SpaceX ended Q2 with 1.4 gigawatts of compute capacity, up from 1 gigawatt in the prior quarter and 400 megawatts a year ago.

“We expect to end this year with over 2 gigawatts of compute,” Musk stated.

Asked about the outlook for compute capacity, Musk revised his earlier target upward on the call. Rather than the roughly 10 gigawatts previously floated for the end of 2027, he said SpaceX is now aiming for approximately 15 gigawatts of power and cooling capacity online by the end of next year, with a stretch goal of 20 gigawatts.

“We’re actually aiming to far exceed that gigawatt number in terms of power online, power cooling, and electrical equipment,” he explained.

“I don’t think we’re going to achieve 20 gigawatts, but we want to have a series of projects that cumulatively come to 20 gigawatts by the end of next year,” he added. “Our goal is to have far more power, cooling, and electrical equipment than we have GPUs. That’s a logical thing to do given the relative expense of GPUs.”

He said SpaceX is taking the expertise it uses for rockets and satellites and applying it to scaling terrestrial data centres.

“SpaceX as a company is incredibly good at hardware,” Musk said.

Going forward on data centres, Musk said SpaceX has decided “to build exclusively on Nvidia, because we think the Vera Rubin is the best architecture.”

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Global revenue from private mobile networks is estimated to grow from $2.3 billion in 2025 to $22 billion in 2030, according to an STL Partners forecast, with the manufacturing industry vertical leading the way in terms of spending.

In a new report, the research company stated the five-year uplift represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 58%, as the number of private network sites increase from 4,000 by the end of 2025 to more than 40,000 by 2030.

Manufacturing is “by far the largest vertical” and will continue to be so, growing at 59% CAGR on the back of AI-driven automation and Industry 4.0 use cases. Logistics, meanwhile is emerging as a fast grower at a CAGR of 86%, driven by labour shortages and a push into automation.

It also cited growth in utilities and construction, which will move ahead of transport by the end of the decade.

Rosalind Craven, principal analyst at STL, said private networks remain a fast-growing market, but cautioned growth alone will not make success straightforward for vendors and telcos operating in it.

“Enterprises are not buying networks for their own sake; they are solving specific business problems and chasing measurable outcome,” she said. “Private networks can support many of those goals, but success hinges on communicating that value clearly and winning budget priority against competing investments.”

STL said it gathered data from across 15 vertical industry verticals, seven use case groups and nine value chain components across 33 countries for its report.

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Samsung Electronics took the wraps off AI memory technology it stated can deliver eight-times the performance of its previous generation, as the vendor presented its vision on how to address growing demands for compatible infrastructure.

Unveiled at the Future of Memory and Storage 2026 event in Santa Clara, California, the company showcased the first concept models of zHBM and zNAND-O, which it stated represent the next-generation of 3D memory architectures.

It stated zHBM is designed for advanced AI computing, presenting a new architecture which vertically stacks high bandwidth memory directly above AI accelerators, “moving beyond conventional designs in which HBM is positioned alongside the processor”.

Samsung explained a next-generation interface system incorporating zHBM is expected to deliver an eightfold performance uplift over HBM5.

With next-generation wafer bonding technology, it can deliver more than 10-times the memory density of HBM5 while enhancing energy efficiency threefold and reducing thermal resistance by more than half.

It also apparently supports customer-specific designs, enabling customised IP to be integrated into “the interlayer between the memory and AI accelerator to expand memory capacity and enhance accelerator performance”.

The vendor positioned zNAND-O as a high-performance set-up combining high efficiency and low latency which is optimised for edge AI environments and capable of handling related real-time, data-intensive applications.

Finally, it showed off what it stated is the industry’s first V10 BV-NAND architecture featuring new wafer bonding with more than 400 layers capable of increasing storage density by 60% compared with previous generations.

$1 trillion market
Samsung is battling with the likes of SK Hynix and Micron to secure a leading position in the memory market and lucrative data centre contracts from major AI players.

In Q2, Samsung registered another all-time high in overall earnings, driven by memory sales.

Counterpoint Research estimates global semiconductor memory revenue will hit $1 trillion this year compared with $240 billion in 2025, due to demand from AI data centres and constraints on supply.

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SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell claimed Starlink Mobile is positioned to compete directly with AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile US, pointing to the trio’s roughly $600 billion in combined annual revenue as a measure of the opportunity.

Speaking on SpaceX’s Q2 earnings call, Shotwell said the service’s capability could improve roughly 100-fold once the company deploys next-generation birds and spectrum acquired from EchoStar, with commercial service targeted to begin by the end of next year.

Shotwell said the current direct-to-cell system operates using around 5MHz of bandwidth through local telco partners, but SpaceX now has access to 65MHz of bandwidth via the EchoStar spectrum deal, alongside plans to deploy roughly 10 times as many satellites.

“So, simplifying, you could look at Starlink Mobile leveraging the next-generation satellite and the EchoStar spectrum as being 100 times better, 10 times 10 better than what we’ve got right now,” she said, adding the upgraded service already supports voice and video calls over apps such as Signal and WhatsApp.

Shotwell described a terrestrial deployment approach built around Starlink’s existing broadband hardware rather than a conventional cell tower build-out.

“You could put a base station, a cellular base station on the gear that holds a Starlink broadband dish,” she said. “You can have kind of these little femtocells around the country and you deploy that as you need it. You don’t have to necessarily spend many billions of dollars in low band spectrum all upfront before you deploy your system.”

She was reluctant to give a specific capex figure for the terrestrial build-out.

“We have a lot of really kind of great and new ideas for how we’re going to do that,” she said. “And I think it will be quite capex efficient.”

CEO Elon Musk elaborated on the same point, saying it was worth emphasising given its importance to the economics of the rollout.

Rather than deploying expensive, hard-to-site large cellular base stations, he said SpaceX expects to deploy a large number of small stations which are effectively Starlink dishes also equipped to provide connectivity in mobile spectrum bands.

“The Starlink antennas are located on the roofs of houses and businesses,” he said. “So, they’ve got a sort of a clear view for providing connectivity directly to cell phones on the ground.”

Musk expects the resulting service to offer “better and higher bandwidth than what is currently available from cellular providers”.

Shotwell stated SpaceX expects strong customer uptake once the improved service launches.

“I anticipate us to be able to acquire quite a few of their customers, because I think our service will be better,” she said, citing Starlink Mobile’s ability to eliminate dead zones and maintain service during natural disasters, given the relative stability of the satellite environment compared with terrestrial infrastructure on the ground.

Q2 numbers
SpaceX reported Q2 revenue of $7.8 billion, up 92 per cent year-on-year from $4.1 billion, in the company’s first results release since going public in June.

Net loss narrowed to $541 million, an improvement of $467 million from the $1 billion loss posted a year earlier.

Capex surged to $18.4 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, driven overwhelmingly by the AI segment where it reached $15.8 billion. Space segment capex came in at $1.2 billion and Connectivity capex at $1.4 billion.

The AI division, spanning Grok, X, cloud infrastructure and advertising, posted revenue of $2.6 billion, up 247%, driven by new Cloud Services Agreements and Grok/X subscription growth.

The business generates compute-contract revenue from customers including Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI, though some recurring revenue has yet to be recognised.

The segment narrowed its operating loss 49% quarter-on-quarter to $1.3 billion, though SpaceX cautioned the unit needs sustained investment to turn profitable. It signed $14.1 billion in contracted Cloud Services Agreements and announced a $60 billion deal to acquire coding tool Cursor.

Connectivity, the Starlink-led segment, generated $4.3 billion in revenue, up 66%, with operating income up 79% to $1.7 billion. Starlink subscribers doubled to 12 million.

The Space segment posted revenue of $962 million, up 29% with an operating loss of $542 million as the company invested heavily in Starship.

SpaceX ended the quarter with $100 billion in cash and marketable securities, and a $47.5 billion backlog.

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Chipmaker Intel joined the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation as a premier member, bolstering open-source RAN software development for 5G and future 6G networks.

Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation operates as a vendor-neutral collaboration hub.

Its core mission is to establish reference architectures, validation programmes and continuous integration and testing pipelines designed to reduce integration complexity and streamline production rollouts for operators.

Intel’s entry brings technical weight to the initiative, particularly across cloud-native infrastructure, silicon platforms and telecommunications architecture.

Intel plans to contribute technical capabilities to help shape open, standards-based solutions and advance AI-native reference implementations capable of running on software-defined infrastructure.

Arpit Joshipura, GM of networking, edge, and IoT at the Linux Foundation, stated Intel’s leadership in cloud-native systems and telecommunications will bolster ongoing efforts to build an open, interoperable ecosystem, ultimately allowing operators to deploy AI-native open-source RAN solutions faster and with greater confidence as the market shifts from innovation to production.

The foundation’s technical work focuses heavily on the central processing components of open wireless networks: the central unit (CU) and distributed unit (DU). By providing a shared, software-defined reference platform built on open-source code, the initiative aims to address multi-vendor interoperability bottlenecks and eliminate the risk of proprietary vendor lock-in.

Intel joins a growing coalition of communication service providers, infrastructure vendors, system integrators and research institutions backing the open-source initiative following its launch earlier this year.

The foundation continues to invite operators and technology partners to participate in its technical working groups and contribute directly to open reference code, accelerating the transition toward scalable, production-ready open RAN deployments.

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