26:19Starlink & Amazon Just Killed the Cell Tower
JCristina breaks down the $31.6 billion race to move the cell tower into orbit, triggered by Jeff Bezos paying $11.6 billion for Globalstar and then petitioning the FCC for 5,105 direct to cell satellites. He walks the RF physics of connecting an unmodified phone to space: the 200 milliwatt SAR cap on handsets, why higher frequency carries more data but stops at walls, and how SpaceX is dropping its DTC shell from 550 km to about 340 km to more than double the power arriving at your phone. On the money side he lays out the CapEx trap the big three are in, roughly $32 to $35 billion a year in tower spend plus land leases and trenched fiber, against a reused Falcon 9 and a satellite covering a thousand square miles. His prediction, stated flatly: at least one of AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile goes bankrupt or gets bought within a year or two.