In business, as in war, the safest bet is often to avoid underestimating your competitors, even when the odds appear to be in your favor.
Verizon CEO Dan Schulman says he’s a student of that philosophy when it comes to Elon Musk’s ambitions to develop SpaceX’s Starlink into a significant US network player.
“Clearly, the tech and the wireless landscape is rapidly evolving, and we need to rapidly evolve along with that,” he said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call Monday. “I also operate under the assumption that everything SpaceX says they will do, they will do, and that they will execute flawlessly.”
Setting aside Musk’s track record of delivering on his eyebrow-raising promises, Schulman said there are significant technical and financial hurdles that Starlink would have to clear to meaningfully compete with established networks like Verizon. But it is possible.
“If they build a terrestrial network, it will basically look and feel like every other network,” he said. “I think we should take it quite seriously.”
News earlier this month that Starlink had acquired a batch of mobile-friendly low-band spectrum sent the share prices of the major US mobile carriers falling by approximately 10%. Verizon is the only one of the three to partially recover from the drop.
“Their service just can’t compete with a terrestrial network in suburban and urban areas, where like 98% of our revenues are,” he said of the satellite-based system. “We’re somewhere between 100 to 1000 times more efficient than they are.”
Building a competitive US network, especially for mobile, would require building as many as 80,000 large cell towers on Earth linked with some combination of satellites and fiber optics, Schulman said.
Schulman estimates that project would cost up to a half trillion dollars over six to eight years, with a minimum of four to six years to actually build out the network.
“Then they need to build retail customer service, back office systems, et cetera., and all of that gets them basically the same network and same capabilities and same cost structure as what we have today,” Schulman said.
The Verizon chief’s remarks come less than a week after his AT&T counterpart, John Stankey, brushed off concerns that Starlink’s mobile network could pose a threat to his business.
“I wouldn’t over-rotate on what I would call one carrier of low band spectrum,” he said.
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