What spectrum costs

A lease hangs from someone else’s licence

Both operators rent because a lease is fast, cheap and reversible. A lease is also derivative: it is written against someone else’s licence, in someone else’s markets, for a term that cannot outlast theirs. A licence is the opposite on every count, expensive and slow to obtain but national in scope if required, renewable, financeable and sellable. For a service that has to work everywhere, that difference is the business model.

The FCC’s market-based licence file, filtered to active records and licensee-type entities, shows the distinction. Neither operator holds a licence for the spectrum its consumer service runs on: every one of AST & Science’s records is a lease, and so are all but two of SpaceX’s. The bands, markets, landlords and dates are set out in Exhibit 1.

SpaceX’s G-block leases show a date that has passed

One date in the file is out of step with everything around it. Among active G-block records (Exhibit 2), T-Mobile License LLC, Nextel West, Trace-Tek, SDF and Tecore all show an expiry of 3 March 2036, most of them re-granted during March 2026. SpaceX’s 173 lease authorisations alone still carry 3 March 2026, the term before renewal.

The file jackets are not public, so the cause is unknown; it may be no more than administrative lag behind a renewal. It does illustrate the structural point: a lease hangs from a licence, and when the licence moved, the leases did not move with it.

Spectrum changed hands at about a dollar per MHz-POP

Comparing a 2020 auction with a 2025 private deal takes a common unit: dollars per MHz per person covered, or dollars per MHz-POP. The national-equivalent version divides the total paid by the bandwidth and then by the US population of 340,110,988, so every transaction lands on one axis whatever its licence footprint (Exhibit 3).

Three points follow from the table. Paired spectrum went at almost a dollar per MHz-POP, and the unpaired, uplink-only block at half that. The largest private spectrum purchase this market has seen cleared within 4% of the C-band auction, a useful reference whenever a spectrum position is called mispriced. The one low-band transaction since, SpaceX’s October agreement for the 800 MHz band, sits well above everything else if the reported price holds; the premium that low band has long commanded in theory now has a number against it, discussed below.

Against those benchmarks, buying AST’s 24 MHz nationwide would cost roughly $5.4B to $7.2B at $0.662 to $0.887 per MHz-POP (our calculation). Low band has historically traded at a premium to mid band, so that range is a floor rather than an estimate; at the $1.68 the 800 MHz agreement implies, the same 24 MHz would be about $13.7B. The company would have had to find that sum before a single satellite was built.

AST did not have the money. It closed FY2025 with $2,335.7M of cash, less than half the lower figure, while spending $1,064.7M a year on the constellation, as part 2 sets out. Buying was never an option; renting was the only way the business could exist.

SpaceX has contracted to own 65 MHz beside the block it rents

SpaceX’s agreements with EchoStar are on the public record in EchoStar’s filings, which contain more than the headline number. Four dated steps define the position SpaceX has contracted to hold, and in our reading the sequence matters as much as the total (Exhibit 5).

1. 7 September 2025. An agreement to buy 50 MHz (2000 to 2020, 2180 to 2200, 1915 to 1920 and 1995 to 2000 MHz) for $17B. The spectrum transfers in two steps, first into Spectrum Business Trust 2025-1 and then to SpaceX, and SpaceX lends the trust roughly $2B to service EchoStar’s notes in the meantime.
2. 5 November 2025. An amendment adding up to 15 MHz at 1695 to 1710 MHz for $2,616,737,853, all in SpaceX stock at $212 a share, which takes the total to $19,616,737,853.
3. 12 May 2026. The FCC approved both EchoStar transactions. Its waivers let SpaceX use the spectrum “flexibly for terrestrial, space-based, and hybrid network architectures”, subject to performance obligations (FCC; see part 5).
4. On or about 30 November 2027. The second step, the one that puts the licences in SpaceX’s hands, is expected.

One detail in the first step matters. The 1915 to 1920 and 1995 to 2000 MHz pair is the H block, immediately adjacent to the G block SpaceX rents from T-Mobile today. The reasoning is not stated, but the effect is that the spectrum being bought lies directly beside the spectrum the service runs on now.

The first step has happened. The FCC snapshot of 13 September 2026 shows Spectrum Business Trust 2025-1 holding 847 active market licences, while Space Exploration Holdings still shows the same 173 leases. The structure is executing in public and on schedule, a year ahead of the closing.

SpaceX leases 10 MHz from a carrier today and will own 65 MHz outright in late 2027 if the second step closes: six and a half times the bandwidth, with no landlord.

An operator does not need 65 MHz to supplement someone else’s network; it needs it to be one. Trade reporting of SpaceX’s Q2 2026 earnings call has executives naming AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon and expecting to take their customers. Those remarks are unverified, and the filings make the point more reliably than any quotation.

In October SpaceX agreed to buy the low band it lacked

Everything SpaceX had contracted to own by the end of September lay between 1.7 and 2.2 GHz, and part 3 sets out why that matters: it is the range that struggles with walls, and the incumbents’ indoor argument rests on it. On 8 October 2026 SpaceX answered the argument with a purchase. Grain Management announced a definitive agreement to sell SpaceX its entire nationwide 800 MHz portfolio (release), and SpaceX described it the same day as “up to 14 megahertz of paired spectrum in the 800 MHz band”, a coverage layer to get its signal through walls while the 2 GHz spectrum carries the capacity (SpaceX update). Neither party has stated the price. The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the deal, put it at about $8 billion in cash, and SpaceX, an SEC filer since its June prospectus, had filed nothing on the agreement by 12 October. The price is therefore reported rather than filed, and is treated as such here.

The block’s history explains why the price matters. The spectrum is the 817 to 824 and 862 to 869 MHz pair that Sprint ran its network on, which T-Mobile inherited in 2020 and was ordered to sell as a condition of that merger. T-Mobile’s filings carry the sequence. DISH agreed in July 2020 to buy it for approximately $3.6 billion, paid $100 million in 2023 to extend its option, and let the option lapse on 1 April 2024. T-Mobile then ran the auction the court’s final judgment required and, on 1 October 2024, closed it without a qualifying bid. In May 2025 it agreed to sell the licences to two Grain affiliates for $2.9 billion in cash plus the 600 MHz licences it was already leasing from Grain, carrying the whole at $3.6 billion and expecting no material gain or loss. The FCC approved that sale on 1 July 2026 and it closed on 11 August. Fifty-eight days later Grain had a buyer at, if the report is right, more than twice what it paid (Exhibit 6).

Two points in that chain matter more than the headline. The first is a sentence in T-Mobile’s 10-Q for the quarter to 30 June 2026: it “may receive a share of certain future proceeds from transactions entered into by Grain that monetize the 800 MHz spectrum licenses”, once Grain has earned a stated return on its capital. T-Mobile is SpaceX’s landlord in the PCS G block and its wholesale partner for satellite coverage, and it is now, through Grain, the seller of the low band that lets SpaceX compete with it, with a filed interest in the price SpaceX pays. We take no view on whether that was the plan; it is the position the filings describe. The second is the regulator’s hand in the sale. The order approving the Grain purchase required Grain to run a competitive process for a satellite partner through a neutral adviser, to report the result by 5 November 2026 and to have satellite applications filed by 4 December, and it deferred every waiver the band needs for satellite use until that partner is named (DA 26-653). The SpaceX agreement landed inside that window. Part 5 takes up what the order asks of whoever holds the band.

What SpaceX has agreed to buy is narrow. A 7 MHz pair is the width of a single channel, and it is the band Sprint built on, which is why the standards call it band 26 and why, as SpaceX says, most handsets already support it. The spectrum’s value lies in where it sits, and so does its price. At the reported figure the national equivalent is $1.68 per MHz-POP, nearly double the $0.887 SpaceX paid EchoStar and above the $1.191 AT&T paid for a mix of 600 MHz and 3.45 GHz. A block that found no bidder at $3.6 billion in October 2024 reportedly fetched $8 billion two years later; in our reading, the difference is what a satellite operator will pay for the one thing its mid band cannot do.

The first low-band position any satellite operator has contracted to own in this market is 14 MHz wide, cost a reported $8 billion, and came from T-Mobile by way of Grain, with T-Mobile keeping a share of the resale.

Two things do not change when the spectrum is bought

Owning the spectrum changes the terms on which SpaceX holds it. It does nothing about the geography a lease can reach or the position of the two operators that never needed to rent, and until 8 October it did nothing about frequency either. Each of the three is a matter of record (Exhibit 7).

• Frequency. Until October, everything SpaceX had contracted to own lay at 1.7 to 2.2 GHz, and everything AST leases lies at 700 MHz. Owning 65 MHz buys width, and width is not propagation. As part 3 set out, the low-band lease is the one that bends around terrain and gets through a wall, and the incumbents’ public argument that satellite direct-to-device does not serve indoors is an argument about frequency and link budget that no satellite count answers. The Grain agreement answers it in kind: up to 14 MHz at 800 MHz is low band of the same character as AST’s 700 MHz, and would be the first low-band position a satellite operator has owned in this market. It does not change width. Of the 79 MHz SpaceX has now contracted for, 14 MHz gets through walls, and a 7 MHz pair is a coverage layer rather than a capacity one, as SpaceX itself describes it.
• Geography. A lease is granted market by market, 654 areas for AST and 174 for SpaceX, and the footprint is whatever the landlord holds and chose to lend, which is why the lease lists read like a patchwork of rural counties. A nationwide licence has no holes in it, and the absence of holes is most of the difference between “supplemental coverage” and “coverage”.
• The incumbents. Globalstar and Iridium appear nowhere in the lease records because they own their mobile-satellite spectrum outright, though narrowly, on the order of 10 to 25 MHz each, which is why their businesses are messaging and wholesale rather than broadband. Set beside the two tenants, the market offers three spectrum positions: owned and narrow, rented and wide, or bought and wide. Each produces a different kind of company.

Terms used

• MHz-POP. One megahertz of spectrum covering one person. A licence’s MHz-POPs are its bandwidth multiplied by the population of its area, and a price per MHz-POP is the total paid divided by them. It is the unit in which spectrum transactions are compared.
• National-equivalent $/MHz-POP. A comparison device: the total divided by the bandwidth and then by the US Census population of 340,110,988, as if every transaction covered the whole country. Real auctions do not sell every licence and licence areas differ, so it is a comparison rather than a valuation.
• Lease and licence. A licence is the FCC’s grant of the right to use a band in a market for a term; it can be renewed, financed and sold. A lease is permission from a licensee to use its spectrum, written against that licence and unable to outlast it.
• PCS G block. The 1910 to 1915 and 1990 to 1995 MHz pair that SpaceX leases from T-Mobile for its service link.
• H block. The 1915 to 1920 and 1995 to 2000 MHz pair immediately adjacent to the G block, part of SpaceX’s purchase from EchoStar.
• AWS-3 and AWS-4. Two of the FCC’s AWS bands. SpaceX’s purchase includes AWS-4 at 2000 to 2020 and 2180 to 2200 MHz and unpaired AWS-3 uplink at 1695 to 1710 MHz. Auction 113 sold leftover AWS-3 licences in 2026.
• Spectrum Business Trust 2025-1. The trust that holds the EchoStar licences between the first and second steps of the SpaceX purchase. It held 847 active market licences on 13 September 2026.
• 800 MHz, band 26. The 817 to 824 and 862 to 869 MHz pair, the enhanced specialised mobile radio block that Sprint ran its network on and T-Mobile inherited in 2020. Handsets know it as 3GPP band 26. It is distinct from the 800 MHz of bandwidth the 2025 statute orders auctioned, which part 5 covers.
• Grain Management. The investment firm whose affiliates NEWLEVEL IV, L.P. and NEWLEVEL, LLC bought T-Mobile’s 800 MHz licences on 11 August 2026 and agreed on 8 October 2026 to sell them to SpaceX, subject to FCC approval.
• Gross winning bids. Auction totals before bidding credits are applied. The auction figures here are gross.