{"id":91560,"date":"2026-11-01T00:13:06","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T16:13:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/tim-farrar-carriers-are-finding-few-will-pay-for-direct-to-device\/"},"modified":"2026-11-01T00:13:06","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T16:13:06","slug":"tim-farrar-carriers-are-finding-few-will-pay-for-direct-to-device","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/tim-farrar-carriers-are-finding-few-will-pay-for-direct-to-device\/","title":{"rendered":"Tim Farrar: Carriers Are Finding Few Will Pay for Direct-to-Device"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Tim
Tim Farrar, president of TMF Associates, at Silicon Valley Space Week 2026. Photo: SatNews<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Direct-to-device has users. What it doesn\u2019t have yet, according to Tim Farrar, is a clear way to get them to pay.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe telcos have really started to conclude that relatively few people are going to pay for direct-to-device service. It\u2019s not a service differentiator,\u201d Farrar, president of TMF Associates, said in a market brief Tuesday on the Satellite Innovation track at Silicon Valley Space Week in Mountain View, Calif.<\/p>\n

His talk landed on the same day the FCC approved Amazon\u2019s purchase of Globalstar, the $11.57 billion deal announced in April and built largely around satellite-to-phone service. Farrar said it wouldn\u2019t be a surprise to see Amazon make more moves into direct-to-device \u201cbecause the telcos so desperately need partners there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The usage numbers<\/h2>\n

Farrar ran through the evidence. On SpaceX\u2019s third-quarter call, President Gwynne Shotwell cited \u201c22 million monthly users on Starlink Mobile.\u201d Farrar said that figure counts anyone who uses the service at least once a month, \u201cwhich is not very good for a service that now has a couple of hundred million people with access to the service.\u201d Fewer than 10% of people with access use it in a given month, he said, and T-Mobile has given statistics suggesting about two megabytes a day of use.<\/p>\n

Revenue is harder to judge. \u201cWe don\u2019t know because Starlink stopped giving us the numbers, which doesn\u2019t inspire a lot of confidence in the size of this opportunity,\u201d Farrar said.<\/p>\n

T-Mobile has told investors that after a year, pretty much no one is buying satellite service as a standalone product, he said, though he cautioned that the carrier is in a fight with Starlink and its claims should be taken \u201cwith a slight pinch of salt.\u201d Apple, which launched Emergency SOS via satellite with Globalstar in 2022, has sold \u201cpretty much no extra phones\u201d because of it, Farrar said.<\/p>\n

Why \u201canywhere\u201d doesn\u2019t sell<\/h2>\n

Some of the problem is physics. In place of a high-gain antenna on a roof, Farrar said, direct-to-device relies on \u201cyour everyday phone in your pocket that\u2019s trying to communicate with a satellite hundreds of miles up in space, as opposed to a tower a mile down the road.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rest is expectations, a lesson the industry has been taught for 30 years, he said. In a 2009 survey by TerreStar Networks, the U.S. operator that filed for bankruptcy in 2010, 20% to 40% of people said they would pay for a phone that works anywhere, depending on the price. TerreStar ended up with about 2,000 users after launching its service, Farrar said.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople don\u2019t get what anywhere means. They think it means in the subway,\u201d he said. In practice, people use direct-to-device in national parks. \u201cIf I fall over and break my leg, I really want to be able to get someone to rescue me. But I don\u2019t want to pay for it every month to do that,\u201d Farrar said.<\/p>\n

Who pays, and how much<\/h2>\n

Carriers are thinking about bundling satellite access into monthly plans, which raises the question of what they will pay providers. Farrar described a spread. Apple\u2019s service is free to iPhone users and, spread across hundreds of millions of phones a year, cheap to provide. Cheaper systems still being built could work if carriers only want to pay a few tens of cents. Providers including Starlink and AST SpaceMobile want a dollar or more a month, and if consumers won\u2019t pay more, he said, carriers can\u2019t absorb that much extra cost.<\/p>\n

The dispute has reached the terrestrial network, too. Farrar pointed to SpaceX\u2019s push to build its own cell sites and the opposition from Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. Musk doesn\u2019t like to back down, Farrar said. \u201cHe\u2019s always spoiling for a fight, and this fight is going to run and run.\u201d<\/p>\n

For smaller players, Farrar\u2019s advice was to stay out of that fight. He named satellite connectivity built into cellular IoT chipsets, along with PNT, safety services, search and rescue, and RF monitoring, as markets that don\u2019t require taking on Starlink head-on or depend on massive numbers of cheap terminals.<\/p>\n

The industry side of the D2D debate came on Wednesday, when Aashu Virmani, senior vice president at Cambridge Consultants, moderated \u201cOrchestrating the D2D Network of Networks\u201d with Iridium CTO Greg Pelton, Skylo co-founder and Chief Business Officer Tarun Gupta, Joby Aviation Vice President Greg Ewert, and Jason Trembley of Terrestar Solutions and the Mobile Satellite Services Association.<\/p>\n

Cambridge Consultants is a sponsor of Silicon Valley Space Week, which SatNews produces.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews Tim Farrar, president of TMF Associates, at Silicon Valley Space Week 2026. Photo: SatNews Direct-to-device has users. What it doesn\u2019t have yet, according to Tim Farrar, is a clear way to get them to pay. \u201cThe telcos have really started to conclude that relatively few people are going to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91560"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}