Catching Up On Comms, Vol. 174: Dish DBS BK, SPCX/CHTR, TMUS Migrates Customers

Research evidence excerpt

Catching Up On Comms, Vol. 174: Dish DBS BK, SPCX/CHTR, TMUS Migrates Customers

TD Cowen

Global Research July 10, 2026

absence of a proper MVNO agreement, perhaps the next play for SpaceX would be to build

its own network or acquire ECHO. The latter was suggested as a possibility in a Barron's Dec.

2025 unsubstantiated news report and we think it is a plausible scenario given 1) ECHO is no

longer participating as a facilities-based carrier yet has salvageable 5G assets and 2) the

disparity in market caps. An acquisition of ECHO would essentially put SpaceX "on second

base" toward building a network, gaining ECHO's valuable 700/AWS spectrum, mobile cloud-

core, the Boost subscribers and platform (care/billing/provisioning/device fulfillment/network

systems), and the residual network equipment that it abandoned on the towers (144K radios

on 24K sites, and it is our understanding ECHO only took the batteries). Thus, acquiring ECHO

could in theory effectively shortcut a build. For more information on our probabilistic-weighted

scenario analysis of possible SpaceX outcomes, see our SpaceX report here (LINK) or slide 6

here (LINK).

SpaceX Files Application for 100K Satellites - Capacity Will Be Great, but Density and

Experience Will Still be the Issues (LINK)

On July 6, SpaceX filed an application with the FCC to launch 100K satellites. The company

looks to blanket the globe for customers to link to a satellite connection essentially at any time

and any location on earth. The Gen3 constellation looks to achieve low latency symmetrical

multi-gig throughput. Our take: This comes as no surprise following the S1 filing and IPO.

More than 6 years ago, we had published our view that SpaceX could scale aggressively

(we flagged a petition for 42K satellites at the time, LINK).