Verizon, T-Mobile take their rivalry to the skies

Verizon and T-Mobile are at it again, and this time, it’s more about what’s above their terrestrial networks than what’s on the ground. To be sure, these two have been at each other’s throats for years, primarily because Verizon made a reputation for itself as the carrier with the “best network” and T-Mobile, long known as a network laggard, set its sights on upending that. Lo and behold, 5G arrived and T-Mobile seized the moment to leapfrog its competitors, claim the 5G network crown and rub it in with endless third-party analyses. Now they’re increasingly ratcheting up the rhetoric when it comes to who offers what and when in terms of satellite-enabled services. It’s getting downright, dare we say, petty? To wit: The National Advertising Division (NAD) of the BBB National Programs put out a press release announcing its decision to back T-Mobile’s claim that it’s the first and only wireless provider to partner with Starlink, the satellite service owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. But it doesn’t end there. Less than an hour after the NAD decision went out, Verizon put out a press release announcing a “significant expansion” of its satellite texting capabilities, enabling its customers to become “the first in the U.S. to send text messages to any other customer device via satellite when outside the reach of terrestrial cellular networks using select Android devices from the series of Samsung Galaxy S25 and Google Pixel 9 smartphones.”