Bloomberg reports that they want at least 80,000 cell sites across the US. They're in talks with tower giant Crown Castle among others. The goal is a fourth nationwide wireless carrier, Jason. They're calling it Starlink Mobile. It will be built on satellites, newly acquired low-band spectrum, and towers on the ground. Crown Castle jumped as much as 10% after hours. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, the established players of course, all fell around 5%. On this week's SpaceX earnings call, Elon Musk said satellites plus spectrum will pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the US. I mean, my question for you, James, would be like, how many US phone customers from AT&T, Verizon do you see jumping over once Starlink Mobile is an option?
Great question. I think the TAM here might be a little bit bigger than people suspect, and that this is incredible for competition. So, for people who are like, 'Oh my god, oligarchs, whatever, M&A,' one of the great things is with Elon's companies and other people's, they get ambitious. They look at other people's highly profitable businesses that are in duopolies, etc. AT&T, Verizon being a perfect example. I think the two of them are the majority of subscribers. You got T-Mobile with some there as well. You know, you add a Google where they have Google Fi, but Google Fi never got this ambitious that they wanted to put satellites and towers, right? And then I'll add another piece to this, which is imagine you have your home, your five family members all on the same plan for their house, for their cars, and for their mobile devices, and that every car on the road has Starlink built into it, whether the person is using it or not.
So, you're driving, you're a Model 3, Model Y, and you're driving it through Hill Country, and you park at a cafe, and I park at the same cafe. I take out my phone, and I'm sitting there. The cafe's got terrible ISDN, whatever, just bad Wi-Fi or they don't have Wi-Fi, and that car is out front and it's got a satellite dish, and it automatically takes my phone and any of those SSIDs, Wi-Fi networks named Starlink, it just automatically connects to, and it connects to it securely with my authentication, and I'm off to the races.
Oh wow. So, it's like you're traveling with your own hotspot. I hadn't even thought about that.
Or I'm traveling with your hotspot. So, I'm walking around Manhattan and there's a thousand cyber cabs, or Austin, there's a thousand cyber cabs driving around, and then there's a thousand private citizens driving around, and there's a mesh network of 500 megabit Wi-Fi, and I'm just walking, you know, or sitting in a cafe working my laptop, and I don't have to get on Starbucks' crappy Wi-Fi or this person's crappy Wi-Fi and wonder about security. It just connects me to whichever Starlink is strongest and not moving, or moving the least.
And by the way, there was a mesh network open-source crypto project that did this mesh network. I think it was Spain, and it was a crypto project where you basically contributed your Wi-Fi at home, opened your Wi-Fi network up, and you earned coins, you know, tokens from some crypto project. And then there was another company that did it with buses in Spain. So, there was like a bunch of Spanish entrepreneurs who were really into this like free Wi-Fi movement, and like to the point at which you wouldn't even have Wi-Fi at your house. There would be so many people sharing it that you could skip having it. Like if you were a student or, you know, you were a low-income person, you could just be drafting off of Wi-Fi constantly. I don't think it ever became very large. But that model has been around for 20 years. People have been talking about Xfinity has this. If you are near another Xfinity, you can log into your Xfinity account and use, you know, someone else's Xfinity if they had Xfinity as well. So, I think we'll be sitting here in three or four years. Somebody will wind up clipping this.
And instead of paying $300 a month for your home and your five family members, which is probably what people are paying right now, 100 bucks for their home and then five family members at 60 bucks each, easily. All right. So, let's say it's 400 for the family members, and I'll include the cars in there. You got two cars which have $10 subscriptions each per month. You got five family members. They're at 60 bucks a month. That's 320, and you're paying 80 bucks a month for your home. Now you're at 400. So that sounds about right. Pretty. Now imagine it's 200. Now imagine it's 200, and it's just Starlink. You get it everywhere. It's faster. Yeah.
I mean, theoretically it could be faster. I mean, I think AT&T, I think this is why AT&T and Verizon are very much on the fiber game, and they have been starting to, Verizon has been starting to proactively tell its customers. You may have seen these stories, and I had it happen to me for one of my phone lines. They've been proactively saying, 'Hey, you know, we can get you a better deal here. We can get you a better deal here.' And they've been offering me lower deals. They're trying to save their customers money, and they're lowering their prices proactively to people who are not asking for it. So, and then they tell you, 'Hey, by the way, your bill's $3 less per month.' So, imagine that you're charging so much that you proactively tell your customers that we're going to lower their prices. It's going to be awesome for consumers. Fiber to the home, that's hard for Starlink to compete against.
Starlink will get to, you know, I regularly get two or 300 megabits down and whatever, you know, slightly less going up. It's fine. But you know, I think this idea of 1 gigabyte fiber and even more is going to be here. It goes: Verizon targets wireless customers with new simpler plans, drop some fees. This is the story I was referring to. Yeah. And so they're trying to simplify, and because Starlink's like, yeah, you can turn it off month by month, right. So that's exactly what they're doing. They're dropping activation and upgrade fees to make it simpler and cheaper to just stay, and you know.
Folks, I'd like to invite folks to STFU. Shut the frack up about socialism, capitalism, and oligarchs and monopolies. Startups break monopolies. It happens. And this is the great thing. And by the way, Starlink ain't going to get a monopoly either because these companies are not going to take it lying down. All right. I'm here with Keith Pis. He is the founder of Lifefield, and they are a CRM system built natively in AI that takes all your emails, calendars, Slack messages, all the stuff you keep losing, puts it in one place, and creates organization out of chaos so you don't lose any customers. Keith, welcome to the program.
