Stankey a firm fan of AST SpaceMobile
July 24, 2026

By Chris Forrester



AT&T CEO John Stankey says he remains a fan of satellite operator AST SpaceMobile and does not think that AST’s success will impact his own firm’s revenue. Stankey said that any suggestion that a direct-to-device satellite operator would take a material market share of his revenues as being “ridiculous”.

In July 22 comments during the company’s Q2 investor call, Stankey said subscribers to AT&T’s fibre and wireless networks leave coverage only 2 per cent of the time perhaps in visits to remote national parks or on boats and that AT&T will be able to capture these rare use cases in 2027.


The overall plan to improve these remote terrestrial services will come about because of a new joint-venture between AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile which will see them pool their terrestrial and satellite spectrum and establish operating protocols.

Stankey says its AST partnership should begin coming to fruition next year with service working seamlessly on customers’ existing devices.

“I also think that it’s possible you could see some shift in serving architectures moving forward in rural areas. I do believe there’ll be areas that satellite might serve adequately that allow us to maybe shrink our terrestrial footprint on what I would refer to as poverty sites and sites that sit out there and pick up relatively small amounts of traffic, but provide continuity of connectivity, and that might be able to positively impact our cost structure in those instances, and at the same time, give the customer a really good experience. I do expect rural characteristics of our business to change,” he continued.

“For example, with one of the partners we are working with, AST SpaceMobile, those are all going to come to fruition as we move into next year. It is going to be a product that we have been working on with the AST offering will be a very intuitive product that does not require the customer to do anything differently. They have their device, and it behaves and operates just like it does today as they are moving around. If they walk off the network, they are not going to walk off the network,” added Stankey.