Competitive intelligence from the public record

Most of what a telecom competitor is about to do is already written down somewhere. A carrier that wants spectrum has to apply for it, a satellite operator that borrows a band has to record the lease, and a listed company has to tell its shareholders where the money is going. This guide sets out how we read that record and what it cannot tell you. Read it to find out:

1. which public sources show a competitor’s next move, and how often each one changes;
2. how to read a licence file and an annual report for what they say about a rival;
3. how to mark what you know, so that a reported claim is never mistaken for a filed one;
4. how to turn a file of facts into a watch list, a one-page brief and a battle card;
5. where the record stops, and what to do when it does.

The record moves before the announcement does

Announcements are written to be read, and filings are written to be relied on. A filing carries a legal duty that a press release does not, and it usually comes first. When SpaceX agreed in September 2025 to buy spectrum from EchoStar, the price and the bands were set out in EchoStar’s Form 8-K the next day. Most of the coverage that followed was a summary of that filing.

The record is also complete in a way that coverage never is. A trade article picks the licence that makes a story, while the licence file lists all of them. In the FCC’s file of 13 September 2026, AST SpaceMobile held 1,197 lease records across 654 markets, and every one of them ran out on the same day, 9 May 2028. No announcement put it that way, yet it is the date that bounds the company’s business, as part 2 of our direct-to-device series sets out.

A telecom competitor leaves its tracks in eight places

Spectrum and listed equity both come with a duty to disclose, which makes carriers, tower companies and satellite operators unusually easy to read. These are the sources we use most, in roughly the order a question reaches them.

Source	What it shows about a competitor	How often it changes	Where to read it
FCC licence file	Every licence and lease: the band, the market, the holder and the expiry date	Daily	The Universal Licensing System and its bulk downloads
FCC auction results	Who bid where, and what each licence cleared at	When an auction closes	The FCC’s auction data site
FCC dockets	What a company asks the regulator for, and what its rivals argue against it	As filings arrive	The Electronic Comment Filing System
Annual and quarterly reports (10-K, 10-Q)	Revenue by segment, capital spending, debt and the risks management will name	Quarterly	EDGAR, with the SEC’s XBRL company facts for figures over time
Current reports (8-K)	Material agreements, acquisitions and changes at the top	Within four business days of the event	EDGAR full-text search
Standards contributions	Which companies are pushing which features, and how hard	Each meeting cycle	The 3GPP document archive, which is public
Orbital elements	How many satellites a constellation has, and in which shells	Daily	CelesTrak
Patent applications	Where research effort was going about eighteen months ago	Weekly	USPTO search

For a private company that holds no licences the record thins quickly, and the last section of this guide deals with that. For the companies that shape most telecom decisions, it is rich enough that the hard part is reading it well rather than finding it.

The licence file

A licence file is a list of rights, and the trick is to turn the list into a position. We work through it in five steps.

1. Pull every record, not just the parent’s. Licences sit in subsidiaries, and leases are often filed by the lessee under a different name from the one on the investor presentation.
2. Separate licences from leases. A lease is a right to use part of someone else’s licence, so it ends when the lease does, whatever the licence underneath says.
3. Sort by expiry. A cluster of expiries is a deadline the company has to plan around, and its competitors can plan around it too.
4. Count people, not records. A thousand records in rural counties can matter less than ten in large cities. Weighting each one by the population it covers, and pricing in dollars per MHz-POP, puts them on one scale.
5. Read the odd entry twice. In the same file, SpaceX’s 173 leases in the PCS G block carried an expiry of 3 March 2026, while every other holder of that block showed 3 March 2036. The file did not say why, so we reported the discrepancy as it stood rather than guessing at a cause.

The annual report

A 10-K runs to hundreds of pages, and most of them do not bear on the competitive question. An hour in five places covers most of what matters.

• The segment note, which says where revenue and profit come from, often more plainly than the opening pages do.
• The cash flow statement: operating cash, capital spending and what was paid to shareholders. What is left after all three is the money a company has for its next move.
• The debt note, for maturities. A company facing a large refinancing within two years behaves differently from one that is not.
• The risk factors, read against last year’s. A risk that is new, or that has moved up the list, is what the company now worries about.
• Commitments and subsequent events, where purchase obligations and agreements signed after the year end are disclosed.

For figures across several years, the SEC’s XBRL company facts return the reported numbers as data, tagged and dated, which saves retyping and keeps each figure tied to its filing. That is how the second part of the direct-to-device series was built: AST spent $1,064.7 million on capital in fiscal 2025 against $70.9 million of revenue, and both numbers come straight from the tagged filing. Across the three national carriers, the same reading showed how much was left once the network and the shareholders had been paid.

Four classes of evidence

A competitor file mixes four kinds of statement, and the danger lies in letting them blur. We mark each line with one of four classes.

• Filed: what the company or its regulator has put on the record. It can still be wrong, but it is attributable, and somebody is accountable for it.
• Calculated: our arithmetic on filed figures, with the working shown so that anyone can redo it.
• Reported: trade press, analyst notes and what someone said on a panel, attributed and unverified.
• Judgement: our reading of what the rest means.

Two rules follow from the classes. A reported claim is never upgraded to a filed one because several outlets repeated it, since they usually repeated each other. And a judgement is written down as a judgement, beside the evidence it rests on, so a reader can disagree with the reading without having to doubt the facts. The evidence classification framework sets out the method in full, with a workbench.

Watch lists, briefs and battle cards

Intelligence that sits in a folder changes no decisions. Three short outputs cover most of what a leadership team or a sales team needs.

• A watch list with dates. Each line names an event that would change the picture, the source where it would first appear and the date to look. For direct-to-device, the list includes the second closing of the EchoStar sale, expected on or about 30 November 2027, and the lease expiries of May 2028.
• A one-page competitor brief. What the competitor holds, what it can afford, what it has said it will do and what the record suggests it will do, each line marked with its class. The last paragraph is the counter-case, the strongest reason to think the brief is wrong.
• A battle card. One page for the sales team: where you win, where they win, what their people will say about you and the fact that answers it. A battle card built on reported claims falls apart the first time a buyer checks one, so it carries only filed and calculated lines.

All three go stale, and the watch list is what keeps them current. When a date on it passes, the brief and the card are checked against what happened and changed where they were wrong. The competitive benchmarking and positioning map frameworks are the places to put the comparison together.

The limits of the record

The public record has three blind spots. Private companies file little, so their plans show only in what they ask regulators for and what their partners disclose. Contract terms are often summarised rather than filed in full, so the price of a deal may be on the record while its conditions are not. And the record lags: a licence application or an annual report describes a decision taken weeks or months earlier.

When a question falls into one of those gaps, there are three honest courses: say so, ask the customers and partners who know, or watch for the filing that will eventually settle it. The one thing a competitor file should never do is fill the gap with a confident guess written up as a fact.