Deep Dive: 0.0002 Percent of the Traffic, and One Company to Buy It
The carriers' new D2D venture is a single buyer with a spectrum pool. SpaceX holds its own spectrum and does not need it. AST SpaceMobile does.
0.0002 Percent of the Traffic, and One Company to Buy It
T-Mobile’s chief executive put satellite at two ten-thousandths of a percent of his network’s traffic in May. On October 1, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon signed the papers on a single company to pool spectrum and buy that traffic for all three. The interesting part of the deal is the supplier it cannot reach.
0.0002%
T-Satellite’s share of T-Mobile network traffic, per chief executive Srini Gopalan, May 2026 data (company-stated)
3 → 1
Three national carriers, one jointly owned venture with one board, signed 1 October 2026 after a 14 May agreement in principle
~65 MHz
Mid-band spectrum the FCC cleared SpaceX to acquire from EchoStar on 12 May 2026, held in SpaceX’s own name
0
Bands, megahertz or ownership percentages the venture has disclosed for its spectrum pool, its name, or its launch date
Srini Gopalan gave the number at the J.P. Morgan technology conference on 18 May. Based on May data, he said, T-Satellite accounts for about 0.0002 percent of T-Mobile’s total network usage, and he framed satellite as fundamentally complementary to the terrestrial network rather than a competitor to it. On the second-quarter call in July the company added a summer peak of roughly 0.0003 percent. Four days before the May remarks, the three national carriers had announced an agreement in principle to form a joint venture (JV) for satellite direct-to-device (D2D) service, and on 1 October they signed the definitive agreement, announcing it simultaneously from Dallas, Bellevue and New York.
What they signed is narrower than the coverage suggests and more pointed than the releases admit. The venture has an interim chief executive, Paul Roth, whose career runs through Ameritech, Cingular Wireless and AT&T, and a board drawn from the three founders while a permanent chief executive is sought. It has no name, and it has pooled what the parties describe as limited spectrum resources, without saying which bands, how many megahertz, or who contributed what, and it has set no launch date. It will run on a standards-based, open platform that any satellite operator may connect to, and each carrier keeps its existing satellite agreements: T-Mobile with SpaceX, AT&T with AST SpaceMobile, Verizon with AST SpaceMobile and Skylo. Terrestrial service stays primary, and the venture’s stated job is the places where there is no mobile service at all, plus redundancy when the ground network fails.
What did the three carriers actually form on October 1?
A buyer, not an operator. The venture does not own satellites and has not said it will. It holds spectrum the three carriers lend into it, and it will contract satellite capacity on behalf of all three on an open, standards-based basis. In the direct-to-device market as the FCC has structured it, a satellite operator that lacks its own mobile spectrum can only serve US handsets by leasing a carrier’s. The venture concentrates the decision to grant that lease, and the price of it, in one company with one board, for a service its own founders measure in ten-thousandths of a percent of traffic.
The sections that follow work through what a single buyer does to a supplier’s price, using the one US precedent for carriers pooling spectrum in a shared vehicle; why SpaceX, which the FCC cleared in May to hold roughly 65 megahertz of its own mid-band spectrum, sits outside the venture’s reach; which suppliers sit squarely inside it, AST SpaceMobile first among them; the regulatory clock, where the live risk is the Department of Justice rather than any satellite; and what to watch for in the filings that will reveal the spectrum the announcement did not.
The remaining five sections are for paid members.
Deep Dives are the paid tier of Satellite Insights. Members read the full analysis the day it publishes; it moves to free members and then to the open web on the usual rotation. If you already have a paid account, sign in and the page opens where you are.
- 02What one buyer does to a price
- 03The seller with its own front door
- 04The sellers who need the counter
- 05The regulatory clock
- 06The read
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