SpaceX announced a deal to acquire nationwide, low-band spectrum from Grain Management to improve service for Starlink Mobile and enable the service to operate indoors.
SpaceX and Grain Management said SpaceX will acquire 14 megahertz of paired spectrum in the 800 MHz band. The deal is subject to FCC approval. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
This comes just after the FCC approved SpaceX to deploy 15,000 satellites for its Starlink Mobile direct-to-device constellation. SpaceX explained how this spectrum will complement the service in a statement:
“While Starlink Mobile’s global 2 GHz mid-band spectrum will provide high-bandwidth capacity in the United States, this new low-band spectrum will provide a coverage layer that ensures Starlink Mobile’s signal penetrates through obstacles, such as walls, and can provide service to customers’ devices even when they are in buildings,” SpaceX said.
Grain is a private investment firm that acquired the block of spectrum from T-Mobile in a deal announced in early 2025 and just completed in August for $2.9 billion in cash and additional spectrum licenses.
The spectrum’s “propagation characteristics make it well-suited for a broad range of mission-critical applications, including private wireless networks for electric utilities and other critical infrastructure operators, enterprise communications, and next-generation direct-to-device (D2D) satellite services,” Grain said in a recent statement.
SpaceX also stated that most existing mobile devices already support this spectrum band.
With this spectrum and the second-generation of Starlink Mobile satellites, SpaceX said Starlink Mobile will be “the first network operator to deploy both satellite and terrestrial spectrum,” and the network will provide “reliable service indoors, outdoors, in cellular dead zones, and everywhere in between.”
Starlink Mobile, the direct-to-device constellation, is separate from SpaceX’s broadband internet constellation.
