Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and COO made a major presentation at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress (MWC) and showcased her company’s new name for Starlink’s Direct-to-Device offering. The new name – hardly a surprise – is Starlink Mobile. The aim is to deliver 5G speeds to mobile devices anywhere in the world. The technology will work within homes, offices and shops.

Her presentation highlighted a massive engineering leap from the first to the second generation of mobile connectivity from Starlink. This evolution relies heavily on the globally harmonised S-band satellite spectrum. SpaceX acquired these spectrum rights in the US – from EchoStar – last year and plans to scale them globally to offer a consistent level of service everywhere.

The journey began with the Direct to Cell offering, now officially named Starlink Mobile. SpaceX reached massive scale rapidly by deploying the entire first generation of 650 satellites in just 18 months. The resulting network already supports 16 million unique users and 10 million active monthly users. To optimise connection quality and ensure space safety, this constellation flies at a low altitude of 350 kms.

Building on this orbital foundation, say reports from MWC, the company is preparing a major technological upgrade to deliver true broadband directly to unmodified smartphones. These new second-generation satellites feature a phased array antenna five times larger than the previous version. This creates a smaller spot beam on the ground and allows for 16-times the number of beams per satellite.

This structural upgrade delivers nearly 100 times the data density and 20 times the overall link performance. The satellites will also feature four times the bandwidth per beam using 20 by 20 MHz beams. This enables claimed download speeds up to 150 megabits per second in ideal conditions. Furthermore, each individual satellite will handle over 100 gigabits on download and 50 gigabits on upload. This makes their capacity comparable to the dedicated Starlink broadband satellites flying today.

To launch these massive new satellites efficiently, SpaceX will rely entirely on its next-generation Starship. This fully reusable rocket is the absolute key to deploying the upgraded network quickly, but while there have been plenty of test flights, SpaceX is depending on very frequent flights of Starship and successful landing of the massive rocket.

Starting in mid-2027, Starship will carry more than 50 of these advanced satellites on every single launch. By maximising each payload, SpaceX aims to aggressively place 1,200 satellites into orbit within a tight six-month window. Ultimately, this rapid deployment schedule will provide contiguous global coverage that reaches traditionally difficult areas like the polar regions.

The ultimate vision is a hybrid network where satellite coverage complements terrestrial networks rather than replacing them. Starlink Mobile will connect phones directly when beyond the reach of cell towers and provide dynamic capacity boosts during emergencies or large gatherings.

Shotwell listed her partner telcos and said that new partners in Mexico and Costa Rica were pending. There are more than 32 countries signed up for Starlink Mobile, covering some 1.7 billion people.

However, it has emerged that Starlink Mobile’s new system would not fully work with current smart phones and it would take around 2 years for the industry to catch up with new chipsets.

Elon Musk said of Starlink Mobile: “It will allow SpaceX delivery high bandwidth connectivity directly from the satellites, to the phone. But there are hardware changes that need to happen in the phones since these frequencies aren’t supported in current phones— the chipset needs to be modified to add these frequencies. That is probably a two-year timeframe.”

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Categories: Articles, Broadband, Mobile, Satellite

Tags: mobile, MWC, spacex, starlink