- SpaceX President and COO Gwen Shotwell and SVP of Starlink Mike Nichols gave a keynote on Monday at MWC
- They talked about all the progress they made with the first version of their direct-to-cellular (D2C) service
- Up next: Version 2, which will be able to support text, data, voice and video. Deutsche Telekom is already signed up for it
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2026, BARCELONA — SpaceX filed for a trademark application for “Starlink Mobile” last year, launching all kinds of speculation about what it might do to shake up the terrestrial wireless industry.
At Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona, we’re finally hearing what the company plans to do – and it’s not exactly schlepping around.
“In 2024, we began launching our direct-to-cell [D2C] constellation, which, as of today, we're calling Starlink Mobile,” Starlink SVP Mike Nichols told attendees during a keynote on Monday. “The goal of Starlink Mobile is to connect to regular, unmodified cell phones everywhere in the world.”
At the time they started the D2C program in 2024, 20% of the land area in the U.S. and 90% of the Earth's surface was uncovered by terrestrial mobile connectivity.
“Starlink Mobile fills in those gaps,” he said. “After 18 months, we fully deployed the first generation Starlink mobile constellation, consisting of 650 satellites, and we are now operating across five continents.”
It’s that first generation of satellites that powers the T-Satellite service for T-Mobile in the U.S., which uses T-Mobile’s PCS spectrum.
Starlink: Terrestrial-like service
But SpaceX is launching a second generation of satellites that will use the precious S-band spectrum that it’s buying from EchoStar; that spectrum has international reach.
The goal for the second-generation Starlink satellite constellation is to provide terrestrial-like connectivity when users are connected to the satellite system, Nichols said.
That is, under the right conditions when the phone is outside and connected to Starlink Mobile, “it should look and feel like you're connected to a high-performing, 5G terrestrial network,” he said.
On its website, Starlink promises big things. “The next generation of Starlink Mobile satellites – V2 – will deliver full cellular coverage to places never thought possible via the highest performing satellite-to-mobile network ever built,” the company states.
The next-gen constellation will see custom SpaceX-designed silicon and phased array antennas, with the satellites capable of supporting thousands of spatial beams and higher bandwidth capability, enabling around 20x the throughput capability as compared to a first-generation satellite, according to the website.
They expect it will be available on most devices in the U.S. when service launches, which is expected in mid-2027, Nichols said.
Deutsche Telekom climbs aboard
They’re also appealing to mobile operators worldwide to get Starlink Mobile V2 connectivity, saying operators can “invest less in terrestrial networks while unlocking seamless service in remote areas and enabling total coverage everywhere for customers.”
Nichols said a key component of the hybrid network is it includes terrestrial and satellite capabilities. “Satellite is complementary to terrestrial networks. It cannot provide the data density that terrestrial networks have, but it can augment terrestrial networks in the places where terrestrial networks cannot reach or when terrestrial networks need additional capacity,” he said.
They’ve already got one big believer in the form of Deutsche Telekom, which followed Monday’s keynote with the news that it’s agreed to be the “first-of-its-kind in Europe” to launch Starlink’s V2 technology. The operator wants to use it to ensure connectivity for customers in hard-to-reach regions due to topographical conditions.
Starlink’s support in Ukraine
Nichols shared the stage with SpaceX President and COO Gwen Shotwell, who talked about how Starlink has been serving Ukraine during the ongoing crisis there.
Besides providing satellite-based broadband services to Ukraine, she said they recently signed a partnership with Kyivstar to provide connectivity directly from satellites to mobile phones. That has been in service for about two months, and already, about 3 million customers are subscribed.
“We’re pleased to support the Ukrainians in both these ways, with broadband as well as direct mobile or the Starlink Mobile connectivity, and we're especially pleased with our relationship with the Ukrainian government to help them during this very difficult time,” she said.
SpaceX/Starlink started out by doing text messages, but they’ve since shown that they’re capable of doing beyond that to provide light data, voice and video calls.
They showed a video of a Starlink executive walking in a dead zone in the Sierra hills outside Lone Pine, California, conducting a video call with a colleague in Seattle who was connected via a terrestrial network.
“I guess we can believe it’s working,” said Chad Gibbs IV, VP of Starlink Business Operations at SpaceX. “We built it.”
Read all of our coverage from Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona here.