SpaceX gets Starlink Mobile competition before IPO as Amazon buys the iPhone's Globalstar

Amazon just announced a full acquisition of satellite service provider Globalstar, the same one that Apple has invested $1.5 billion in to power its Emergency SOS via satellite since the iPhone 14.

Globalstar's constellation will be folded into Amazon's Leo low-earth orbit network, and the Apple partnership will carry over too. Amazon Leo is now set to continue powering satellite features on supported iPhone models and wearables like the Apple Watch Ultra 3 that is currently available at $100 off on Amazon. Those include emergency texting, but also Messages, Find My, and roadside assistance, with hundreds of millions of potential clients for Amazon.

What Amazon gets are Globalstar's MSS spectrum licenses with global authorizations, the kind of regulatory work that takes many years to accumulate, and it gets to jump ahead of the queue by paying $11.57 billion. While that sounds like a lot, SpaceX paid $16 billion for the Dish spectrum that will allow it to launch its Starlink Mobile 5G service directly to cell phones.

Starting in 2028, Amazon Leo will deploy its own next-generation direct-to-device (D2D) satellite system, promising voice, data, and messaging beamed straight to ordinary cellular handsets with no special hardware required, like Starlink Mobile. Amazon claims the new D2D architecture will deliver substantially higher spectrum efficiency than legacy direct-to-cell systems, which is a telltale sign that it is gunning for the likes of T-Satellite's service of T-Mobile that is delivered by Starlink.

The complete Amazon Leo network is slated to include thousands of satellites and support hundreds of millions of customer endpoints globally. The transaction will close in 2027, pending regulatory approval, as Globalstar’s shareholders have already greenlit it.

While SpaceX's Starlink currently dominates satellite broadband and direct-to-cell services, Amazon Leo with Globalstar's spectrum and Apple's user base can mount a real challenge, just as SpaceX is gunning for a record-breaking IPO with Starlink as its main revenue source.