Image: Starlink
Starlink Mobile is now live in Brazil through Brazilian carrier Vivo, Starlink said on Monday morning, opening satellite messaging and apps in cellular dead zones to 50 million Vivo customers.
According to the company, 7 million phones are already connected, and it is calling this the first nationwide Starlink Mobile service to cover an entire country.
As the direct-to-cell side of Starlink, the service lets satellites talk straight to ordinary phones, with no dish or special hardware needed. The current service handles texting, messaging apps and basic data when a phone drops out of range of a cell tower, which in Brazil covers huge stretches of the Amazon, farmland and rural highways.
The launch comes a little over two weeks after Brazil’s telecom regulator, ANATEL, approved Starlink Mobile’s full 2 GHz access in the country. That mid-band spectrum is what Starlink says will carry its next-generation service.
Starlink is pitching that next step, Starlink Mobile V2, as the real prize. The company says V2 will make sure all Brazilians can get high-speed mobile internet, “from small fishing villages deep in the rainforests to remote stretches of highways.”
Brazil is already one of Starlink’s biggest markets. SpaceX said in January that Starlink had passed 1 million subscribers in Brazil, its second-largest customer base at the time, and most of that demand comes from places where cell coverage runs out.
The Vivo deal also dwarfs Starlink Mobile’s earlier carrier rollouts. Just last week, Starlink said its phone service had reached 11 million people in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Bangladesh through VEON’s networks. A single Brazilian carrier now brings a customer base more than four times that size.
It fits a bigger push. Elon Musk has said Starlink Mobile could bring in hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and SpaceX is seeking 80,000 cell sites to turn the service into something closer to a full carrier.
Several details are still missing. Starlink and Vivo haven’t said whether Vivo customers pay anything extra for satellite coverage, which phone models are supported beyond the 7 million already connected, or when Starlink Mobile V2 broadband will reach Brazil. Vivo’s own post on Monday morning teased the service as “about to arrive” without giving pricing or plan details.
For now, a phone deep in the rainforest can show Starlink where it used to show no signal. The bigger test is whether V2 can turn that text-and-apps lifeline into real mobile broadband across a country this size. Would you pay extra for satellite coverage on your phone plan?
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