T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan confirmed that the company’s exclusivity partnership with SpaceX’s Starlink doesn’t end this year.. His comments came during T-Mobile’s Q2 earnings call yesterday (July 23) when asked about the partnership with Starlink.. – Getty Images.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk had previously noted in 2024 that the exclusivity period with T-Mobile would last for a year.. T-Mobile and SpaceX first announced their partnership in August 2022, as the carrier set out plans to provide mobile signal connectivity from space with the target of leaving no area without coverage in the US, before T-Mobile launched its D2D service in July of last year..
When asked about the exclusivity deal, he confirmed the deal doesn’t end this year.. This also led to Gopalan and T-Mobile highlighting the company’s satellite-focused spectrum-pooling JV with rivals AT&T and Verizon. The carrier’s two rivals notably have their own separate partnerships with AST SpaceMobile.. “We think what’s at stake now is to make the experience for the customer agnostic of which provider you are, agnostic of which device you are, and to pool spectrum so that we can actually make this a significantly better customer experience,” he said.. “That’s what drove the JV.
Looking forward, the JV does allow for individual operators to have conversations and agreements with other parties, but our expectation is the vast majority will be sourced through the JV.”. Satellite network usage remains low. During the call, Gopalan also reiterated that the carrier’s satellite offering is “complementary” to its terrestrial mobile network..
He’s previously noted that satellite accounts for 0.0002 percent of T-Mobile’s network usage. Even in the company’s peak summer months, that figure has only grown to 0.0003 percent, he told analysts on the company’s earnings call yesterday.. “Direct to cell is really a technology that in many ways we worked with Starlink to invent.
It’s the first scale deployment of that. What we’ve learned over the last four years is it is a complementary category,” he said. “It’s a really small percentage of the usage on our network, and it is a complementary service.. “For us, it’s clear that with time, this is no longer going to be a differentiation.
It’s going to be table stakes as a complementary service to have satellite along with your cellular service,” added Gopalan.. This usage is often confined to remote locations such as national parks where traditional network coverage is not as available.. As for any trends around AI traffic, Dr.
John Saw, chief technology officer, T-Mobile US, noted that T-Mobile hasn’t seen a surge in its overall mobile network.. “The current growth in AI is focused on model training, large-scale agentic automations, and heavy back-end automations. A lot of them actually are confined to wireline transport networks and massive data centers,” said Sow.. “This type of compute, we have not seen putting a material strain on mobile networks.
We have not seen any surge in mobile traffic due to AI, even though every year we see mobile traffic going up, regardless of AI or not, to support our mobility tonnage as well as fixed wireless.” Sow adds that the telco is prepared as AI traffic continues to increase, along with the growth of physical AI.. Not chasing headline fiber numbers.
Amid the fiber buildout across the US, the topic was also pointed at T-Mobile’s executives during the call.. Unlike some of the carrier’s rivals, T-Mobile is reluctant to throw out fiber location targets. For example, AT&T aims to reach 60 million by 2030, and is nearing 40 million, which it expects to hit this year..
Gopalan said T-Mobile isn’t interested in chasing such numbers.. “On fiber, I think we’ve been very clear; it’s worth reiterating. We’re not chasing some vanity number of homes passed. We think that’s irrelevant.
We’re in this game to create equity value. That’s how we’ve thought about all of our fiber JVs,” he said.. T-Mobile has previously said it wants to reach 12 to 15 million households with fiber by the end of 2030.
The carrier notably sealed its acquisition of Lumos last year as part of a JV with EQT Infrastructure, along with its fiber JV acquisition of Metronet a few months later.. André Fuetsch, chief operating officer, broadband, T-Mobile US, noted that the carrier is already seeing the value of these JV’s.. “We’re getting close to 20 percent penetration over the first 12 months of deploying fiber in each area, and we need to take those 20 percent into consideration, because we’re not overbuilding copper or overbuilding cable.
In a lot of these markets, we start with zero customers. All the customer additions we have are actually all incremental in terms of revenue and margin for us,” said Fuetsch.. For the quarter, T-Mobile posted service revenues of $19.0 billion, which was up nine percent year-on-year (YoY), while postpaid service revenues jumped by 13 percent YoY to $15.9bn..
The telco added 277,000 postpaid net accounts during the quarter, up 27 percent from the previous quarter, though down 13 percent YoY.. More in Carrier Networks. 31 Mar 2026.
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