(Credit: Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
The startup that once vied to liberate broadband customers from the clutches of big telecom will become the property of one of America’s largest telecom firms. On Wednesday, Verizon announced that it will buy fixed-wireless firm Starry for an undisclosed price.
Launched in 2016, Starry provides fixed-wireless connectivity mainly to apartment, condominium, and office buildings in Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington. It charges reasonable prices—current residential plans start with a $30 tier offering 200Mbps downloads and 50 Mbps uploads—and does not enforce the data caps of cable incumbents like Comcast.
Starry has also achieved more reliable performance with millimeter-wave frequencies than Verizon has with mm-wave, by leveraging larger antennas and its own beam-forming technology to deliver beyond-line-of-sight reception.
Verizon’s press release cites almost 100,000 Starry customers in multiple-dwelling buildings in its five markets. The company will fold Starry’s technology into its fixed-wireless operation, the brightest spot in Verizon’s consumer business, and use that to accelerate plans to bring that service’s coverage to 90 million households and double fixed-wireless subscriptions to 8 to 9 million by 2028.
Spokeswoman Christina Moon Ashraf said Verizon would have more details to share, such as the fate of Starry’s brand, after the FCC approves the transaction. That approval does not seem to be in any doubt, considering the commission’s sharp deregulatory tilt under Chairman Brendan Carr.
Starry got off to a reasonably fast start in its initial market of Boston; in a research note posted Wednesday, analyst Craig Moffett, co-founder and senior analyst at MoffettNathanson Research, cited a market share of 5 to 6%.
But its attempt to go public in 2022 went sideways when the stock price swooned, leading to a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in February 2023, followed by a bankruptcy exit in August of that year that took the company private. Along the way, Starry’s plans for a significant expansion of service to single-family homes fell short, and in 2023, the company also elected to retreat from Columbus, Ohio.
“From what little public information is available, it doesn’t sound as though things have gone particularly well in the time since their brief status as a public company,” Moffett wrote in his note. “Their proprietary beam-forming technology is arguably their most valuable asset.”
If so, that would be the second time that Starry founder Chet Kanojia left a dent in the tech universe with some innovative radio engineering. His previous startup, Aereo, offered low-cost streaming of local TV stations via tiny antennas, one per subscriber, set up in centralized reception facilities. Aereo had chosen that complicated architecture to comply with the letter of copyright law, but in 2014, the Supreme Court held that it violated the spirit of those statutes and so infringed the rights of broadcasters, a decision that put the company out of business.