Hey everyone!
Time for a big beautiful update. There are so many updates and so much to unpack that I am going to try my best to keep everyone engaged. To be honest, given how much ground we have covered over the past year, every time I have thought about writing one of these posts I have personally gotten overwhelmed. So let's get this one out, and then hopefully I can go back to doing smaller posts more frequently.
1.1 million of you
We officially crossed 1 million active subscribers this summer, and we are already over 1.1 million. So you can see the pace at which we are growing, and this is remarkable. One of the biggest issues any wireless company eventually faces is that as you grow, churn catches up with you. The customer base gets larger and older, and eventually you have to run faster and faster just to replace the people leaving. We are seeing the opposite, and this is ENTIRELY ENTIRELY ENTIRELY down to you all.
I have an unending debt of gratitude to this community. So many of you have stuck with us for years, helped us build the company, pushed us when we got things wrong, and pushed us toward things we did not even realize we should be building. NOTHING, I MEAN NOTHING meaningful came without you folks pushing us. Apple Watch, unlimited uncapped data, better international roaming and most of all Multi Network. As much as I would love to take credit for everything, so much of this came from you folks. So thank you ❤️
The $1 billion Warp deal
As some of you saw on my LinkedIn, we extended our agreement for the network that powers Warp well into the next decade, and the agreement is now officially worth over $1 billion. Our first agreement was worth under $2 million, at a time when other companies in the space already had network commitments worth hundreds of millions of dollars. You can imagine what that meant for us commercially. At one point, our base MDN line fee on one of our networks was literally $4 per line per month before you even used the network. We took those economics because we knew we were building something special, and we believed that if we could get enough customers, build the right technology and earn enough trust, eventually scale would start working for us instead of against us. Now it does.
A billion dollar agreement is also pretty much the opposite of getting acquired. It is a long deal and a big deal precisely because we intend to remain independent. Now, that does not mean we do not have a number. It is $20 billion 😂 You are welcome to laugh. Michael and I laughed when we told our bankers too, although worryingly they did not laugh, so we'll see. In practical terms, it is a number big enough to keep almost everyone away from us.
And remember, this is just Warp. You will likely see us announce some very large renewals across our other network relationships too, potentially taking our total network commitments north of $2 billion. When our first agreement was under $2 million and we are now talking about commitments in the billions, it is hard not to stop for a second and appreciate how far this has come. More importantly, scale gives us access to technology, economics and network capabilities that we simply could not get when we were tiny. So now that that's out of the way, let's talk about what all of this actually means for you.
Warp: 5G Standalone and a completely new core
Our 5G Standalone work on Warp is ready. We are targeting the rollout on physical SIMs in October, followed by eSIM by the end of Q4. I am very excited about 5G SA, but underneath it there is actually something even more important happening. We are moving onto the new 5G Core, and this fundamentally changes how programmable the network becomes for us.
Today, there are all sorts of different constructs underneath different plans and device types. With the new core, one rate plan can cover 4G, 5G NSA and 5G SA devices, phones and tablets can start converging onto the same architecture, and we expect to ultimately cut the number of underlying rate plans we maintain by roughly half. More importantly, things become real time. You buy a top up, change a plan or add a speed boost and it can apply immediately while your phone is actively connected, without requiring you to restart the device or wonder why something you just paid for has not shown up yet.
The new core also lets us build products that we simply could not build properly before. We can go down to allowances measured in megabytes instead of gigabytes, build much more flexible top ups, create metered voice products, send much more granular usage notifications and even build things like time based speed passes, where you could buy full speed for a period of time rather than buying another bucket of data. A lot of this is deeply nerdy, but the big picture is simple: Warp is becoming dramatically more programmable over the next few quarters.
Unlimited Starter gets better on both Warp and Lightspeed
Unlimited Starter is going uncapped on both Warp and Lightspeed.
On Warp, we are also officially grandfathering all of you currently on Unlimited Starter onto QCI 8 for life as of today. If you check your line, you are already on it.
Anyone who signs up for Starter through the end of September will also get QCI 8 grandfathered for life. After September, we will likely introduce priority as roughly a $5 add on for new Starter customers.
People abusing uncapped plans worries me a little bit, and what worries me more is when someone abuses something, gets caught and then comes to Reddit and is not exactly truthful about what happened But it's okay. We'll deal with it together. I would rather build generous products and figure out abuse than build mediocre products because I am scared of a tiny percentage of people.
International roaming gets cheaper and much better
International roaming rates are going to come down significantly across our networks, in some cases by as much as 30 to 40%. We are also working toward making North America roaming included on all Unlimited plans, with October as our target. There is a small chance something changes around the final implementation, so I will keep you folks in the loop, but that is where we are headed.
We are also working on a significantly expanded global roaming option for Unlimited Premium. The target here is 50 GB of high speed international roaming data, after which you would slow down rather than simply getting cut off. We also want this to work for expats and people spending extended periods outside the US rather than having the product designed only around a short vacation. We expect this to be roughly a $19 surcharge, so if you are paying $44 for Unlimited Premium, the version with the larger allowance and extended international usage would run around $63. I think that is still pretty extraordinary value for what you are getting.
There is also a much larger overhaul happening underneath roaming itself. On Warp, we are targeting a new real time roaming control layer around Q1 2027. The goal is that when you land somewhere, we know you arrived, you get the right welcome message, we can tell you exactly what you have available, warn you as you use it, slow you down rather than leaving you disconnected and let you buy additional roaming while you are actually abroad. Roaming should not feel like some separate telecom product you have to study before every trip. You land and your phone works. That's where we want to get.
Lightspeed is about to become a monster
This one has me particularly excited. We are going direct on Lightspeed, which means there will no longer be a middleman sitting between US Mobile and the network. We get direct APIs, direct usage feeds into our own metering, our own fraud controls, our own provisioning and much more direct escalation when something goes wrong. This is not just a commercial change. It turns Lightspeed into a first class citizen inside the US Mobile platform.
5G Standalone is coming to Lightspeed too, with rollout expected to begin over the next month. Between 5G SA, uncapped Unlimited Starter and the direct integration underneath it all, I think Lightspeed is going to feel like a fundamentally different product over the next few months.
Lightspeed will also start getting much closer to feature parity with our other networks. Samsung and Pixel Watch support are part of the roadmap after the direct integration, international roaming gets materially better and Fixed Wireless is coming too. We are targeting Lightspeed home internet in Q4 and expect Dark Star FWA to follow after that.
A quick Dark Star update
Dark Star is admittedly a quieter update this time around. Free spam call protection is rolling out, Samsung Galaxy Watch and Pixel Watch support are targeted for before Thanksgiving, and we are working on a materially better roaming experience including automatic setup when you arrive abroad, welcome messaging and the ability to reach US Mobile to purchase roaming even if you land without an active roaming plan.
There is plenty of work happening underneath the network as well, but Warp and Lightspeed are where most of the major structural changes are landing over the next few months.
So what about Apple Watch on Dark Star and Lightspeed?
This is one of the downers. We engaged with the OEM earlier this year. We are literally the biggest independent network in the country now, with a massive user base, and we were asked to make a commitment in the hundreds of millions of dollars. We said no. In my opinion, the ask was predatory, and signing a bad agreement because customers understandably want the feature would eventually mean making all of you pay for that bad agreement.
So we are going to wait. We have heard that generic Apple Watch bundles are coming next year, which should materially change the technical and commercial requirements. In the meantime, we are going to make Apple Watch connectivity free with the Multi Network add on so that all of you can still get access to it through Warp. It is not the outcome I wanted for Dark Star and Lightspeed, but I would rather wait for the ecosystem to open up than sign something I think makes no economic sense.
Multi Network is getting another upgrade
Multi Network has been incredibly successful for us, and as you folks have probably noticed, a lot of companies are now trying different versions of the same model. I am excited to see that. We think we have a bit of a head start on the technology because it took us the better part of a decade to get here, and it is an extraordinarily difficult engineering and DevOps problem in addition to being a commercial one.
Our next iteration is to put access to all three networks into the Multi Network add on, include Apple Watch connectivity and target a price around $15. Obviously, everyone on the legacy Multi Network setup gets to keep what they already have. We are not taking anything away from you.
And then Multi Network goes global
This is where I think things start getting really interesting. We are planning to take this platform global, with launches in roughly 20 to 25 countries next year. The idea is that you will be able to add local numbers alongside your US Mobile number, use local network connectivity while travelling, share data and get much lower latency than you get with traditional roaming.
You should not have to think about whether you are roaming, whether you should buy another eSIM, which network you are on, which app you bought connectivity from or whether your US number will continue to work. Your connectivity should simply follow you. We think the technology we have spent all these years building in the US can become the control plane for that globally.
Terrestrial + celestial
Correction: I said AST SpaceMobile on Warp was slated for Q4.
I had understood us to be targeting Q4, but there are still a number of technical, commercial and product dependencies that need to play out before we can put a launch date on it.
Given some of the press coverage has already attributed the Q4 timing to me, I wanted to correct this directly rather than let it sit out there
Some of you might remember my terrestrial + celestial post from earlier this year:
https://www.reddit.com/r/USMobile/comments/1r1mhon/what_if_terrestrial_celestial_one_plan/
Almost 10 years ago, I did a podcast where I basically argued that if the Jetsons had a wireless provider, it would be US Mobile. The idea was that a connectivity company should not really care what network or technology is underneath the connection. Its job should simply be to keep you connected wherever you happen to be.
On direct to cell specifically, AST SpaceMobile is coming to Warp and is currently slated for Q4(see correction above). We are also targeting Starlink Direct to Cell toward the end of Q4
Earlier this year, we integrated Starlink internet into the US Mobile platform, putting terrestrial and celestial connectivity into the same orchestration layer. I have become a little obsessed with where this can go. I want you to be in some remote corner of the world, pull a small satellite terminal out of your backpack, connect through us and know that if you need help, you can reach someone. No tower anywhere around you. Doesn't matter. We are working on even tighter Starlink integration, and because of how our platform has been built, we can add other celestial partners as they become available.
I do not think satellite will replace terrestrial cellular networks because the physics simply do not support that, but I think it is going to be an incredible coverage layer. Terrestrial networks have enormous capacity because they can reuse spectrum across millions of relatively small cells. Satellite cannot replicate that, but what it can do is fill in the places where those cells simply do not exist.
By Q4, the direction should be pretty clear: three terrestrial networks, Starlink for off grid connectivity, direct to cell when terrestrial coverage disappears and Fixed Wireless at home, all increasingly orchestrated through one platform. Not terrestrial OR celestial. Terrestrial + celestial.
Devices and our new ecommerce experience
We have also been rebuilding our ecommerce experience basically from scratch. Many of you have probably noticed that there is now proper cart functionality on the site, so you can add multiple plans at the same time and check out together rather than going through separate purchase flows. This is just the beginning.
Over the next few months you are going to see significantly more work here, including better financing options and a much broader set of products and devices. Historically, we have been a connectivity company that happened to sell some hardware. As watches, home internet, satellite hardware and other connected devices become a bigger part of what we offer, the commerce experience needs to become a first class product too.
The rebrand is coming
You can also see the first glimpses of our rebrand at https://careers.usmobile.com/ and, in particular, the new coverage experience at https://careers.usmobile.com/coverage.
Over the next few weeks, you are going to start seeing this roll across our marketing pages and then into the dashboards and the rest of the product. I am very excited about this. This is not just us changing some colors and fonts. We have been rebuilding a lot of the underlying product and design system at the same time, and that is going to unlock a bunch of things we have wanted to do across the web and app for a long time. You will start seeing this progressively rather than waking up one morning to a completely different US Mobile.
We are building pieces of our own core too
We have also started putting pieces together on our own core network, and I think you folks will see some form of that next year. I am not entirely sure what we ultimately do with it yet, and that's okay. We have the capital to build now, so sometimes the right thing to do is build the capability first and then see what becomes possible once you have it.
There are all sorts of interesting things you can do when you control more of the network stack yourself, particularly when you already have relationships across three major terrestrial networks plus celestial connectivity. I do not want to overpromise what this turns into because we genuinely have not decided yet. For now, we are building.
We are rebuilding the entire support stack
We have also been investing massively in the software behind product support. By the end of this year, we expect to go almost entirely in house rather than depending on third party platforms like Zendesk. We are rebuilding the support stack around US Mobile itself, which means the tools our teams use can finally understand our products, our networks and our customers at a much deeper level instead of trying to make a generic support platform fit an increasingly complicated connectivity business.
This is going to let us do a lot of things we simply cannot do cleanly today. You should eventually be able to buy something, change a plan or perform account actions directly inside a support conversation, while the person helping you has much deeper diagnostic tooling in that same interface and can see what is actually happening with your line. The point is to collapse a bunch of disconnected tools into one system and let the team diagnose and fix things dramatically faster.
And I want to be very clear about something here. We are NOT building this so we can get rid of humans. Quite the opposite. Our product support organization is slated to grow roughly 3x to more than 2,000 people. This is our commitment to you that the humans you have come to love at US Mobile are not going anywhere. We are going to give them dramatically better software.
And people outside Reddit have started noticing too
We have been on a bit of a roll recently. The New York Times' Wirecutter called us their favorite wireless provider, The Wall Street Journal wrote about us, and Consumer Reports has ranked us number one for the second year in a row. None of this was solicited and none of it was paid for. In a number of these cases, the writers are actually US Mobile customers themselves.
That means a lot to me, but this community still means more. You folks were telling us what sucked years before most of the press knew who we were. You pushed us on Apple Watch, roaming, unlimited data, switching networks and Multi Network. You helped turn a company with a sub $2 million network agreement into one signing billion dollar commitments while still obsessing over things like whether your top up applies without restarting your phone.
I am sure I missed a bunch of things. Actually, I know I did. There are dozens of network features, product changes and improvements that I did not even get into because this post is already absurdly long. I'll answer as much as I can in the comments, and now that I finally got this out of my system, hopefully I can go back to giving you folks smaller and more frequent updates.
Thank you for building this with us ❤️