$ASTS: Another Expert Network excerpt from former senior Starlink Direct-to-Cell manager.
1) This passage highlights T-Mobile's short-term focus of wanting to be associated with something cool without assessing long-term strategic impact or even asking the most important question - does the tech even work?
2) Also confirms that at the time of the August 2022 announcement, Starlink Direct-to-Cell was pretty much a vaporware response to get ahead of the Apple/Globalstar announcement.🤷♂️
FORMER SENIOR STARLINK DIRECT-TO-CELL MANAGER:
"There's different reasons why telcos sign up for a service like this. T-Mobile is a very, very unique case. The genesis of all this, if you remember, was Apple was due to announce their satellite service. Elon called together a quick press conference, got everybody on stage and announced that T-Mobile and Starlink would do the same. Now, there was some efforts internally to bring this to market, but really the fire that accelerated all this was the Apple announcement.
T-Mobile, very, very historically, tends to be a huge marketing machine. What they're looking to do and what their financials have shown is that they're very good at adding subscribers. Now traditionally, that would be through having free HBO or Apple TV . This is yet another thing that they offer to try and attract customers. Their view on this tends to be more on what is the customer acquisition story? What does it cost us to do that? What is the cost of churn as people leave? What can we do to have people in the highest ARPU bucket?
The other thing to note is they're very much tying it down to particular kinds of devices. A lot of the U.S. telcos tend to make money also through device financing. Forcing an upgrade cycle in a market where upgrade cycles have been pretty slow is a good incentive for them as well. A partnership like T-Mobile, for example, isn't as worried about the number of messages or the amount of data. It's more, what is the brand value of somebody like SpaceX, Elon, and Starlink and how does that complement the T-Mobile brand and how does that increase awareness or get more people interested in joining? Very, very different for T-Mobile."