PARRISH MILLS, Ohio — Shares of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile fell in after-hours trading Thursday after SpaceX announced a deal to buy a nationwide portfolio of 800 MHz spectrum licenses, a deal that remains subject to FCC approval.
Dana Reis, a telecom analyst who covers all three carriers and owns shares in all three, said the market had reacted correctly. “The sky was always going to be a competitor. Nobody wanted to say it,” Reis said. “Now it’s a competitor with a license, which is worse.”
Reis went further. “Every phone in America already contains a small part of the sky,” Reis said. Asked what that meant for the phones, Reis said they should be “reclassified as a satellite business with a screen,” and that the three carriers would need to “re-examine the bars.”
Asked whether the sky had been consulted, Reis said it had, and that it had bought a license.
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said the deal was a sign of the market working as intended. “The signal was always coming from somewhere far away. Now it’s coming from somewhere farther away, and it’s a better deal,” Brickhouse said by phone from a car wash. “It’s just common sense.”
Reis said the deal was unlikely to affect the carriers’ customers in any way they could notice. “Nobody will see a difference,” Reis said, “unless they look up.”
The size of the declines varied by the time of the quote. Reis said the price had been checked three times, and that each time it had been lower, which Reis called “consistent.”
Glenn Whitacre, reached by phone, filing from a rental car on the shoulder of a state highway. The call dropped twice.