Satellite

When Julie Slama and her husband moved to a home outside Dunbar, Nebraska, in April 2022, they were happy customers of Elon Musk’s Starlink.

Of all the analyses coming out ahead of SpaceX’s big initial public offering, one in particular stands out. First, some background. All three of the big mobile network operators in the U.S. have said “no” to an MVNO deal with Starlink, SpaceX’s most profitable unit.

There are thousands of billionaires across the world. But there is only one trillionaire. Elon Musk became the first person to amass a personal fortune of over $1,000,000,000,000—that’s 12 zeros—after shares of his rocket company SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange on June 12.

A fast-expanding cloud of space waste is turning the Earth’s atmosphere into a chemistry lab. As SpaceX prepares to go public, investors are pondering the practicalities of Elon Musk’s multiplanetary vision.

Louisiana has signed a grant agreement with SpaceX’s Starlink to expand broadband access through the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, marking another major step toward achieving universal access. This agreement allows construction to begin on projects that will deliver access to 10,635 locations by the end of the summer. The project covers locations in over 50 parishes statewide, moving Louisiana closer to full coverage while advancing the state’s commitment to using taxpayer dollars effectively to deliver results.

Starlink has started charging a $10 monthly rental fee for hardware in a shift away from its longtime practice of selling hardware to customers for a one-time charge. Starlink residential ordering pages now show an upfront hardware cost of $0 and a monthly kit fee of $10, similar to the hardware rental fees long charged by cable and telecommunications companies.

Appearing at the Mizuho Technology Conference in New York, AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches was asked about what some may call the “elephant in the room,” i.e., SpaceX’s increasingly aggressive moves to chip away at the broadband market. His answer? Between fiber, cable, fixed wireless, and the wireless infrastructure that exists in the U.S., that probably covers 99 percent of the population, but there’s 1 percent of the population that’s not covered today in very rural areas.

Days after the U.S. presidential election in November 2024, then-Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr posted a photo of himself with Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump at a SpaceX rocket launch. “A historic day at Starbase,” Commissioner Carr wrote in the post, referring to the Texas headquarters of Mr. Musk’s rocket and satellite company. “Another giant leap forward.” Around the same time, Mr. Musk recommended Commissioner Carr to President Trump as an ideal leader for the agency.

The Federal Communications Commission's Space Bureau granted, with conditions, the request of Kuiper Systems (Amazon Leo) for a limited waiver of the FCC’s space station milestone deployment requirements for the Amazon Leo Gen1 Constellation (“Gen1 Authorization”).  Amazon Leo is poised to offer cutting-edge satellite services worldwide as a new competitor-at-scale in low-Earth orbit, providing high-speed broadband to customers in unserved and underserved areas.

I review the latest laptops and write about cutting-edge AI tools, but I'm based in Idaho, in farm country. My ground-based internet options are pitiful, and my daily work demands high speeds, low latency, and rock-solid reliability. So I've been using Starlink satellite internet for years now.