Mobile World Live (MWL) brings you our top three picks of the week as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk outlined Starlink’s global broadband ambitions, Verizon lifted the lid on the network behind the FIFA World Cup 2026 and the World Bank urged developing nations to boost AI adoption.

Musk targets global broadband domination with Starlink

What happened: Musk outlined plans to increase Starlink’s network capacity 100-fold, claiming the satellite broadband business could eventually “deliver a majority of the world’s internet”.

Why it matters:  The tech mogul said the goal hinges on the rollout of an expanded V3 satellite constellation capable of delivering around 10 times the performance of current V2 models. To support the plan, the company asked the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for approval to deploy up to 100,000 low-Earth-orbit V3 satellites, supplementing the roughly 9,600 V2 satellites already in orbit. Musk argued the additional capacity would allow Starlink to eventually carry a majority of global internet traffic in countries where the service is authorised to operate, while driving a tenfold increase in Starlink revenue even if revenue per bit falls by 90%. Quilty Space founder and CEO Chris Quilty told MWL that the company’s “bold claim” flouts its “prior statements that Starlink was most appropriate for rural user”. While V3 satellites are expected to provide a “10x boost”, he noted “aggregate network capacity is a misleading metric because capacity is geographically distributed while demand is geographically concentrated”. Earlier this week, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell claimed that Starlink Mobile could compete directly with operators including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile US using upgraded satellites and additional spectrum.

Musk targets global broadband domination with Starlink

Podcast: Inside Verizon’s World Cup connectivity

What happened: In the latest edition of the MWL podcast, Kavit and Justin sat down with Verizon wireless chief network officer Srini Kalapala, who detailed how the operator delivered connectivity as the official network provider for the FIFA World Cup 2026.

Why it matters: Earlier this month, the operator revealed its network carried almost 500TB of data across all US host stadiums, including 29.2TB during the final between Argentina and Spain. To handle demand, Verizon boosted stadium capacity by three to five times, installed thousands of under-seat antennas, deployed nearly 140 small cells around venues and fan zones, and laid 80,000 miles of fibre to transport broadcast feeds from all World Cup stadiums. In the podcast, Kalapala described the tournament’s “104 games in 39 days across 18 different stadiums in three countries” as “probably one of the largest projects that we worked on.” He explained Verizon had to ensure stadiums comprising 70,000 to 85,000 people could access “good quality mobile connectivity”, while also delivering “the most reliable network” for broadcasters and powering private 5G applications including referee cameras.

Podcast: Inside Verizon’s World Cup connectivity

World Bank urges lower income nations to grasp AI opportunity

What happened: The World Bank called on developing economies to accelerate AI adoption, arguing low-cost, locally adapted tools could accelerate economic development without requiring frontier models or hefty AI infrastructure investments.

Why it matters: In its World Development Report 2026: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence, the organisation said AI “could allow developing countries to do in a decade what might otherwise take a century”, provided governments address gaps in electricity, internet access, digital skills and institutions. World Bank SVP and chief economist Indermit Gill said AI has “thrown developing economies a lifeline”, but warned countries “must hurry” because the technology is “spreading faster and is more context-specific than earlier general-purpose technologies”. He added many high-impact use cases do not require large models or data centres, instead relying on “small, low-cost AI tools” tailored to local conditions. The report highlighted applications across healthcare, agriculture, tax collection and judicial services, while warning AI could also deepen inequality and weaken public trust without appropriate action. Foresight Communications Consultancy CEO Howaida Nadim argued the World Bank’s framework recognises that “greater opportunity lies in adopting proven tools and adapting them to local languages, data, institutions and development priorities”. She added “the next AI divide” might be “between those that successfully adapt AI to their development needs and those that remain primarily consumers of systems built elsewhere”.

World Bank urges lower income nations to grasp AI opportunity

The post The Friday File: Starlink; Verizon; World Bank appeared first on Mobile World Live.

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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Another wave of constellations has staked claims for communications satellites in non-geostationary orbit (NGSO), but what hope do newcomers have alongside the industry’s entrenched, vertically integrated giants? A mix of […]

The post Finding room in Starlink’s shadow appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceX shares dropped on Wednesday after Elon Musk’s plans for blockbuster spending to position his AI and rocket company as a data center developer spooked investors.

SpaceX surpassed analysts’ expectations in Tuesday’s debut earnings report, posting quarterly revenues of $7.8 billion, well above analysts’ estimates of $6.82 billion and up 92 percent from a year earlier. It posted a net loss of about $541 million, better than estimates of $2.12 billion.

But shares in SpaceX fell 10 percent in early trading after it reported capital expenditure of almost $16 billion on AI, double the previous quarter and well above Wall Street’s expectations. It said spending would persist at current levels for at least two more quarters.

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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.

The post SpaceX claims Starlink Mobile will rival AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile US appeared first on Mobile World Live.

SpaceX plans to start deploying upgraded Starlink satellites into orbit on the next flight of its Starship vehicle, scheduled for as soon as the end of the month.

The post SpaceX to begin Starship orbital flights appeared first on SpaceNews.