SpaceX he selected Qualcomm as technology provider for the terrestrial component Of Starlink MobileThe mobile phone service that the company intends to launch in the United States. The deal was announced by Qualcomm Technologies and covers the Dragonwing Cellular Infrastructure platforms, which will power a 5G network with national coverage. Deployment is expected to start in 2027 and, over the course of a multi-year agreement, will involve tens of thousands of sites.
The bulk of the technical work will be entrusted to two solutions. Dragonwing QRU100 will be integrated into radio units installed on each site and will provide highly integrated processing for the radio functions of Massive MIMO systems. Dragonwing QDU100 will instead take care of Layer 1 processingi.e. the operations most sensitive to latency, downstream of the signal received from the radio. Layer 1 software is commercial-grade.
According to Qualcomm, both platforms are designed to increase performance while reducing power consumption. The objective is to improve the relationship between performance and power absorbed both in the radio part and in the distributed unit (DU), with a positive impact on the overall economics of deployment. The expected scale makes this relevant: an infrastructure of tens of thousands of locations amplifies any difference in efficiency per individual site.
Starlink Mobile radios will adopt Massive MIMO technology with 64 transmit and 64 receive paths (64T64R). The configuration allows you to direct signals to multiple phones at the same time, to the advantage of coverage, capacity and spectral efficiency, and therefore more efficient management of the available spectrum and a greater volume of traffic served.
Dragonwing-based building blocks, both on the radio side and on the distributed unit side, should offer Starlink a flexible foundation for a multi-band network, built across multiple rollout phases. SpaceX spent much of 2025 expanding its frequency portfolioalso with the spectrum acquired from EchoStar, and now plans to use it on different bands, in subsequent phases. Qualcomm specifies that, although the current deployment is focused on terrestrial 5G, the low-power processing and open and evolvable architecture lay the foundations for future evolutions in terms of connectivity and intelligence.
“Together with SpaceX we are building a world-class cellular infrastructure in the United States, advancing 5G today and with the opportunity to lay the foundation for AI-native 6G in the coming years,” said Durga Malladi, EVP and GM of Technology Planning, Edge Solutions and Data Center at Qualcomm Technologies.
Michael Nicolls, Senior Vice President of Starlink, commented: “We shouldn’t live in an age where calls keep dropping, whether you’re at home or on the move. Starlink is building the first fully integrated national satellite and terrestrial network, which will keep people connected wherever they are. We are excited to partner with Qualcomm Technologies and leverage their expertise and platform to accelerate the development time of our end-to-end architecture for base stations.”
The agreement represents a further step in SpaceX’s expansion into mobile services. So far the business has focused mostly on satellite connectivity for ordinary smartphones, including sending text messages through partners like T-Mobile. The new terrestrial network offers the company a path towards management of a more conventional national mobile service, alongside the satellite infrastructure.
