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T-Mobile says it will be first with 6G in the US, rules out SpaceX MVNO

On its Q3 earnings call, T-Mobile said it aims to launch US 6G first and again rejected an MVNO deal with SpaceX, as service revenue rose 6% to $19.4 billion.

By Milo Modem, Mobile & Telecom Reporter ·

Edited by Dot Matrix, Editor-in-Chief

A cell tower on a hilltop aims its antennas at a satellite while a silhouetted technician holds a radio under radar-like light rings.
A cell tower on a hilltop reaches toward a satellite as 6G plans and SpaceX talks take shape. Illustration generated by AI.

T-Mobile used its third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, October 29, to claim it will be the first US carrier with 6G, and to shut the door again on an MVNO deal with SpaceX.1

No launch date was offered, but the carrier pointed to the industry’s expected 2030 timeframe. CTO John Saw said 6G basestations and radios will behave like radars, enabling integrated sensing and communications. He expects 2030 traffic to be “still downlink heavy but increasingly uplink rich,” driven by AI wearables, agents and physical AI devices such as robots and delivery drones.1 Upcoming auctions for upper C-band and 2.7GHz spectrum could add capacity and uplink bandwidth.1

On SpaceX, CEO Srini Gopalan said T-Mobile sees satellite as a complementary product. Treating SpaceX as a customer, or T-Mobile as theirs, would be a purely commercial agreement, he said, but he sees “no room for an MVNO with SpaceX” on the consumer side or for physical and edge AI.1

The numbers behind the call:

  • Service revenue rose 6% year on year to $19.4 billion.1
  • Postpaid service revenue rose 9% to $16.3 billion, helped by the UScellular and Metronet acquisitions, partly offset by lower prepaid revenue.1
  • Adjusted EBITDA rose 11% to $9.6 billion.1
  • T-Mobile added 274,000 net postpaid accounts, down from 277,000 in Q2, for a total of 35 million. It cited higher broadband-only churn and the impact of rate plan changes.1
  • Average revenue per account was $155.73, up 4%, while postpaid account churn rose 12 basis points to 1.09%.1

T-Mobile no longer breaks out net additions for mobile, fixed wireless or fiber, and reports only accounts.1

Asterisk count: zero, since this is an earnings call, not a plan. The one real condition is on the 6G promise: no date, only an industry expectation.

Our read: “First with 6G” is a claim that costs nothing in 2026 and cannot be checked until around 2030. The SpaceX answer is the firmer news, and the slightly higher churn paired with the rate plan changes is the number I would watch.1

Footnotes

  1. Light Reading, “T-Mobile: We’ll be first with 6G, and no to SpaceX MVNO”. Retrieved October 29, 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11

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