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# SpaceX is buying US airwaves to take on mobile networks, but Starlink still has no South African licence
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/spacex-800mhz-spectrum-starlink-mobile-south-africa-licence/
- Published: 2026-10-12T03:15:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-12T03:14:59.000Z
- Description: SpaceX's deal for a nationwide block of US 800MHz airwaves, reportedly worth about US$8 billion, is meant to get Starlink's phone service working indoors, but South Africans are unlikely to see it soon.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News

The phone in your pocket can probably already pick up the airwaves SpaceX has just agreed to buy. On Thursday, SpaceX and Grain Management, a private investment firm, announced that SpaceX will take over a nationwide US block of the 800MHz band, so that Starlink Mobile, its service connecting ordinary phones to satellites, can work indoors, once the FCC, the US telecoms regulator, approves it.

SpaceX's own explanation is that different airwaves do different jobs. Starlink Mobile already holds global spectrum at 2GHz, which carries a lot of data; the new low-band block is a coverage layer, meant to get the signal through walls and to phones inside buildings. Put the two together, SpaceX says, and Starlink Mobile becomes "the first network operator to deploy both satellite and terrestrial spectrum".

SpaceX is paying up for airwaves, and not for the first time. Grain bought this block from T-Mobile in a deal that closed only in August, paying US$2.9 billion in cash plus other spectrum licences. Neither company has said what SpaceX is paying, and the figure of about US$8 billion in cash comes from the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter. It is not SpaceX's first spectrum purchase, either: last year it agreed two deals with EchoStar worth a combined US$19.6 billion.

## Why the big US networks lost 6%

The existing networks' investors took it as a threat. T-Mobile US, Verizon and AT&T all lost about 6% of their share price in extended trading. In May the three had agreed in principle to form a satellite joint venture of their own, which some analysts see as their answer to SpaceX. Verizon's spokesman Rich Young was less worried, [telling Reuters](https://techcentral.co.za/starlink-coming-for-your-mobile-operator/287107/?ref=businessbagel.com) that spectrum without a network to use it is "just empty airwaves".

## The licence Starlink has never asked for

South Africans should not expect any of it soon. Starlink has no South African licence, because SpaceX has never asked Icasa, the communications regulator, for one: it objects to the rule that licensees be 30% owned by historically disadvantaged groups. Icasa said in June that it cannot currently issue new network licences to satellite operators at all, and that the realistic route in is to buy an existing licence.

The service has reached the continent, just not this end of it. Airtel Africa switched on Starlink Mobile in the Democratic Republic of Congo on 14 August, calling it Africa's first commercial satellite-to-phone service. Africa's first Starlink phones, in other words, are on Airtel's network, and none of them are in South Africa.