AT&T Teams With Satellite Provider AST SpaceMobile as It Looks to Boost Coverage

T-Mobile has partnered with SpaceX to boost its coverage through SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network. Verizon has been talking about working with Amazon’s Project Kuiper program. Now AT&T has announced a new satellite partner of its own.

On Tuesday the carrier announced a new partnership with AST SpaceMobile, a satellite company, to use its low Earth orbit satellites to help bolster AT&T’s terrestrial coverage. In a video about the partnership, Chris Sambar, AT&T’s president of network, says that the wireless carrier has received “conditional approval” to use some of its wireless spectrum to connect cell phones to the satellites…

Sambar does, however, hint at a possible consumer application as he describes how his mother-in-law’s drive from rural Virginia to Richmond to “see her kids and grandkids” includes a road that currently struggles for coverage from “any wireless carrier.” That drive, he says, could potentially be covered by a “space-based mobile solution.”