Came across this. Not exactly good news. Right now, the AI/data center side (or well, hyperscalers are rising, but optical is dropping really sharply) is being sold off, for a change once again.
If this news is true, then goodbye SpaceX. Let’s see what kind of network it turns out to be.
News summary by AI
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SpaceX is building its own terrestrial 5G macro network: Elon Musk’s SpaceX (Starlink) is moving beyond just the satellite and small-cell business to build a nationwide terrestrial 5G macro network in the United States. The company plans to lease up to 80,000 tower sites and invest billions of dollars in the project.
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Giant deal for Qualcomm, bypassing traditional OEMs: Professional and traditional network vendors (Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung) were not selected to build the network. SpaceX entered into a broad agreement with Qualcomm. Qualcomm will supply critical 5G RAN semiconductors and low-layer (Layer 1) software for both distributed units (DU) and radio units (RU).
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Innovations in utilizing limited spectrum: SpaceX has significantly less spectrum at its disposal (around 80 MHz) than traditional US carriers (such as T-Mobile, which has ~400 MHz). This is compensated for by bringing new 64T64R Massive MIMO technology (and potentially giga-MIMO in the future) to lower frequency bands, significantly boosting network coverage and capacity.
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SpaceX is building its own system stack: Qualcomm will supply the hardware accelerator cards and lowest-layer (Layer 1) processing. SpaceX itself is developing the higher-layer (Layer 2 and Layer 3) software as well as the Core network components on top of Qualcomm’s platform—largely following a model similar to Vietnam’s Viettel.