Verizon CEO Dan Schulman joined AT&T CEO John Stankey in providing executive-level insight into the physics challenge satellite-based communication provider face in attempting to barge into the lucrative wireless communications space, insight that comes as rumors continue to mount over SpaceX’s Starlink ambitions.

Schulman told investors during Verizon’s latest earnings call that current satellite-based broadband offerings were having “no impact” on the carriers’ broadband penetration or broadband capabilities.

“And by the way, that's not surprising,” Schulman said. “It is very difficult for satellite providers to provide a service that's even close to what we can provide with our broadband services. … Today's satellites … their beams cover hundreds of square miles. Even at the very lowest broadband speeds, called 100 [Mb/s] down and 20 [Mb/s] up … the ceiling that they can provide service without degrading quality for everyone … is very small.”

Schulman further noted that even looking down the road when there are potentially more satellites in place that can provide higher link speeds, “you know, maybe they take their beam size down from hundreds of miles to 25 [miles] in suburbs and in urban areas.”

Taking that former geography, “the ceiling for them before they degrade service is 10 to 40 homes passed per square mile at the lowest broadband speed at 100 [Mb/s],” Schulman continued. “If they try and compete against [fixed-wireless access] at 300 [Mb/s] that ceiling drops to five to 20 homes per square mile versus what we can do is anywhere between 500 and 2,000, so we're like 100-times to 1,000-times more efficient.”

Schulman at this point brought out the "p" word.

“Our speeds and our capabilities are much higher, and it's basically not possible because of physics. Not because of execution, but because of physics,” Schulman said. “For satellite to effectively compete against the terrestrial network in either mobility or broadband in urban and suburban geographies, which, by the way, is where like 95 to 98% of our revenues are. … Satellite does have a [total addressable market] for sure. It's probably somewhere between six and eight million homes in the U.S. but it's in primarily very rural geographies.”

Does this class have two professors?

Schulman’s comments echo similar statements made by Stankey late last year during an investor conference, where the executive specifically pointed to limitations with “upstream bandwidth,” which “becomes more important in the AI dynamic.”

“It’s inherently going to be a more fragile upstream uplink than what you're going to get in a terrestrial network that gets on fiber really quickly,” Stankey said of a satellite upstream connection. “The faster you can get something on fiber, the more robust that upstream uplink is going to be, and the more low-band spectrum you have to do that, the more robust that upstream link is going to be. Satellite doesn't have those things.”

Stankey built on that spectrum notion by stating AT&T and its direct rivals T-Mobile US and Verizon each have access to approximately 300 megahertz of spectrum that can be transmitted from each cell site, which is more than triple the amount of spectrum the newly spectrum filled SpaceX can provide from its satellite constellation.

“If you think about it, you get 80 megahertz you get to put on a spot beam that has a radius that is dramatically larger than a cell site – you know, two-and-a-half miles, two miles for a cell site, you're talking about a spot beam right now that's probably close to 20 miles, and you're taking 80 megahertz and you're putting over that period, you have a weaker uplink. That's a hard putt to be a like-to-like replacement,” Stankey said.

Are there other models?

That’s not to say that either carrier is totally dismissing the satellite opportunity.

Both carriers alongside fellow nationwide operator T-Mobile US recently formed a joint venture that will see them pool together spectrum resources that can be offered to satellite communication providers. Stankey previously explained that this venture is designed to foster more satellite-based connectivity competition.

“One of the fundamental things you want the JV to do is to make sure that there's a robust wholesale market in satellite,” Stankey said. “That means multiple constellations to buy from, and at the end of the day that's a good thing because that means capacity will be out there that ultimately can be delivered to customers. It means a robust wholesale structure will keep pricing in check, so there isn't a bottleneck of any particular single provider that can dictate what that pricing is, and that ultimately benefits the consumer, because the product and service becomes more widely available.”

T-Mobile US CEO Srini Gopalan added that while the JV would pool resources, “we will compete, obviously, as providers in terms of how we innovate around that, but as we look around corners, the differentiation doesn't exist, and this is about creating an efficient wholesale infrastructure.”

Those perspectives also come as rumors continue to mount over a possible move by SpaceX’s Starlink service to enter the wireless telecom space. Depending on the source, this move could come via either a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) model where SpaceX would partner directly with a terrestrial-based cellular service provider to bundle that service with its satellite-based broadband offering; a potential full acquisition of a wireless operator; or the latest talk of a potential partnership with a current MVNO.

Executives for all three nationwide mobile operators have dismissed those first two notions, with Schulman tackling the last.

“There is no backdoor to our MVNOs in any structure and … we think that satellite is very complementary to our service,” Schulman said. “We want to work with the satellite providers primarily through the JV with T-Mobile and AT&T, but there is no reason that we can see to extend an MVNO to any satellite player and there's no way that anyone can get access to our MVNOs as well.”