It is crazy what you hear about Elon Musk in telecom. Some people think he can defy physics, eliminate the need for cell towers, and build magical networks that will destroy every mobile operator on Earth.
Others dismiss everything he does simply because they cannot stand him.
Some commentators have financial interests in SpaceX succeeding. Others seem personally invested in seeing Musk fail. Personally, I couldn’t care less about him. I love engineering, I understand the telecom business, and I hate bullshit.
So here are my 20 truths and lies about Musk in telecom.
Not today, not in ten years, and probably not ever for high-capacity mobile service. Physics is brutal. At the same frequency, a satellite 350 km overhead faces roughly 49 dB more free-space path loss than a terrestrial antenna 1.2 km away. That is 85,000 times greater signal attenuation before accounting for antenna gains. Massive satellite antennas and beamforming help, but they cannot eliminate the capacity advantage of terrestrial networks, which reuse the same spectrum across thousands of small cells. Satellites are excellent for coverage. Terrestrial networks win on capacity per square kilometer. This is not an engineering challenge; it is physics.
