u/ride_the_tasty_waves

What you are not hearing from IPO analysts, reporters and other and cheerleaders. Getting to hundreds of millions of users won't be a simple as they are saying.

Starlink Roadblocks - Countries around the globe are not going to let Starlink own telecom and AI. Orwellian control will never be granted. There will be negotiations that take years and regulations that change the architecture of how Starlink currently offers it services.

Starlink India

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/telecom/telecom-news/starlink-india-launch-hits-security-roadblock-ahead-of-spacex-ipo-elon-musk/articleshow/131614869.cms?from=mdr

Starlink USA

https://www.lightreading.com/satellite/why-the-big-three-telcos-satellite-joint-venture-is-good-for-america

There's speculation they may buy a MNO or use a MNVO in USA. Competitive sats providers can join the JV to provide services.

Strlink EU

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/05/26/eu-to-favour-european-satellite-services-to-prevent-musks-starlink-expansion

One analyst on MSNC said Starlin could go from 18 billion to 1 trillion by 2030. He's out of his mind, or completely out of his league on this. He has no idea of the headwinds/regulations/roadblocks they will encounter country by country.

It makes sense for Starlink to do some kind of deal, they need gateways in countries. ASTS uses Nokia gateways to connect their satellites to a countries MNO's terrestrial networks in part to eliminate having to deal with regulators in all the countries they do business in. The MNO's deal with the regulators.

A cell phone connecting to a satellite bypassing a countries ability to monitor/control/regulate will not happen on a large scale, if at all.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/prediction-spacex-wont-merge-tesla-002000174.html

Background details - ASTS is using Nokia RAN’s for satellite to terrestrial gateway connections.  Nokia is using the NVIDIA CUDA platform as part of the 1 Billion Dollar investment deal they did with Nvidia for their AI-RAN’s software development.  They are currently testing with T- Mobile and other MNO’s, it’s not part of any ASTS gateways currently.

On the last EC Abel mentioned “AI Edge” improvements/compute that can efficiently integrate spectrum to predict traffic based on location.

To me, from a solution standpoint I think it makes sense to predict traffic on one platform, NVIDIA CUDA, so both the RAN and the satellite can be in sync and more easily optimized.  Although it would be possible for ASTS to develop a solution and deploy to their satellite standalone.  My understanding is the ASIC chip manages bandwidth on each satellite; this is the first I heard about AI and traffic prediction and I’m not sure what their approach would be if they develop their own solution.   

Would love to hear everyone thought’s on this.

 

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/edge-computing/space-computing/