SpaceX and T-Mobile are starting a trial in late-2023
to use unmodified handsets for text (and later, voice and data) with the Starlink V2 network to remove cell coverage dead-zones. [1] [2]
It's achieved by "dedicating a slice of T-Mobile's Mid-Band PCS [1.9 GHz] spectrum, to be integrated into Starlink satellites, launched next year", with each Starlink V2 satellite hosting two 5-6 meter long cell-spectrum antennas, in addition to the existing Ka- and Ku-band antennas.
They're aiming for the US with the trial, and growing to global coverage by entering into reciprocal roaming agreements with the international carriers who hold licences to the relevant mid-band spectrum.
Elon Musk says "this won't have the kind of bandwidth that a Starlink terminal would have, but it will enable texting. It will enable images. And if there aren't too many people in the in the cell-zone, you could even potentially have a little bit of video."
Musk claims 2 to 4 megabits per cell-zone, 1000-2000 simultaneous voice calls per cell-zone, with the cell-zone of course being much larger than a terrestrial cell-tower.
> Splashy announcements of satellite-cellular connectivity from Apple, Starlink, and T-Mobile in the third quarter of 2022 promoted the idea of anywhere, any-kind connectivity.
Apple's stuff is probably orders of magnitude more reliable, the system they use has been battle-tested for decades.
Both Starlink's sat-cells and Apple's Globalstar link will be a real benefit for people who get stuck in a bad situation unprepared, but if I were a serious rock climber or similar, I'd still prefer a full-scale Globalstar, Iridium terminal or EPIRB device, then an iPhone with Globalstar, and only then Starlink's offer.
Globalstar with an iPhone is not battletested at all. A huge chunk of the complexity of a sat system is in the ground side and the iPhone form factor is new.
TMobile/SpaceX proposed service does sound better than the one Apple currently provides. Apple's works right now though and T/S's doesn't which is a notable difference. I also haven't read anything about the T/S service that says they will exclude iPhones. As an iPhone user, I would love to have access to both services! It's unlikely I would switch to a different phone manufacturer to get access to this service if it isn't available to iphones, but i might switch to TMobile from my current mvno to get it on iphone.
I think they’ll def come up with a paid plan for extra features. Same way T-Mobile only basic features are going to be free. Same way Starlink residential is orders of magnitude cheaper than marine edition.
My previous comment was flagged so let me add some more context around "Musk claims".
Remember Musks claims of FSD being X months away (for years), and SpaceX will be cheaper by orders of magnitude, and Twitter will be open to all free speech, and the cyber truck, and new roadster, etc etc? The point is, Musk has shown himself as unreliable and we can hardly trust his claims.
I'm passingly familiar with the old Keyhole/Hubble optical satellites, but I didn't think we launched any of those recently after the Shuttle shut down. The more interesting tech is probably sigint-targeted radio analysis, where antenna and LNA design is more important than physical aperture, I wouldn't be able to tell anything about those with a physical dimension. What would the new satellites launch on?
NRO Orion sats are probably the largest antennas ever in space (100m).
"These satellites at geostationary orbits collect radio emissions (SIGINT) and act as replacements for the older constellation of Magnum satellites. The satellites have estimated mass close to 5,200 kg and very large (estimated 100 m diameter) radio reflecting dishes."
This is such a tired take. Strong leaders are able to marshal engineers to build things like the iPhone, electric cars, reusable rockets. Both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk excelled at this, and just because they're not doing the low level engineering work doesn't mean they don't get any credit.
And by all accounts Steve Jobs was extremely involved in the UX design of the original iPhone, and Elon Musk is often involved in engineering decisions at his companies.
That's not to say they both don't have flaws, but it's intellectually dishonest to deny their accomplishments because you don't like them.
It's much better that commenting is open, so that people thinking these things can express themselves, and be exposed to different viewpoints, resulting in more thinking and shared knowledge.
Without that, an opinion can fester in someone's mind, becoming worse since there's no way to release it and no visible counterarguments.
In my younger Slashdot days, I would read these polarized discussions, and it taught me about many perspectives on even the simplest thing.
> In my younger Slashdot days, I would read these polarized discussions, and it taught me about many perspectives on even the simplest thing.
I know precisely what you mean, but I'd argue that you were in a position to consider multiple perspectives in the first place. A lot of people are not. They have determined their position ahead of time, and regardless of new information, they will not change it.
This. Long forum flame wars taught me a lot about the subjects bur also about discourse as such. These days the top comments are quickly moderated, like they have been here, and the only thing you are left with is headless conversations about how shallow takes are bad - without having an opportunity to react with said supposed shallow takes for youself.
> Strong leaders are able to marshal engineers to build things like the iPhone, electric cars, reusable rockets
talking about tired takes...
The real refreshing take would be acknowledging that these things would exist even without them and that the cult of personalities is such an antiquate way to explain the success (or the demise) of companies (looks like Americans have learned nothing from the fall of Stalin).
Anyway: Steve Jobs did not give us smartphones and for sure Musk did not invent electric cars or reusable rockets.
They are (were?) good at marketing what other people made and other people still built.
In the case of Steve Jobs he died before turning full Elon Musk, whose contribution to the companies he's been part of has been mostly bad PR and egomaniac stunts.
Not that it hasn't worked more than a couple of times, but that doesn't mean it's good.
Psychologically wise, they are both visionary tyrants, emphasis on the second trait, which is the prevalent, the most evident and the one other people had to deal with.
As Psychology Today has put it "Steve Jobs success sends the wrong message to aspiring leaders" because "while Jobs was a successful leader, entrepreneur, and visionary, he fell considerably short of the qualities possessed by the very best leaders"
In tech everything is still muddy and it's hard for people outside of the field to differentiate between the genius and the impostor, so to put it in terms that are easier to understand for the general public, Musk and Jobs are Kanye West, the people who actually designed the things you mentioned and then built them and made them work, are Frank Zappa.
edit: to prove the point.
Who can name, off the top of their head, the strong leader who gave us the Nokia 1100 and the Nokia 1110 that are as of today the two best selling mobile phones ever in human history (250 million units each)?
Or the strong leader responsible for Mario franchising, almost 800 million copies sold, or Pokémon, 450 million copies sold?
Countless inventions were inevitable, like the automobile or powered flight. The most obvious sign for this are inventions that happened independently in quick succession, or where there's debate who was first.
You could also reasonably claim that the iPhone wasn't so much a "product invention", other phones with similar functionality existed, the genius was making a great version and targeting it at consumers instead of business people. But that's still an invention of sorts.
Tesla is a bit like that, but Musks real achievement is SpaceX, which came into a stagnant space where each rocket was some upgrade of an upgrade of an ICBM, and showed that a startup can compete in the space, and even disrupt it. And now two decades later the space launch provider market is full of startups with fresh ideas. Without musk this won't have happened
Musk real achievements has been convincing people that he is better than he actually is.
> and even disrupt it
disruption should lead to jail time in modern democracies.
it is an euphemism for "break every possible rule until they catch us"
> Without musk this won't have happened
Without the nazis Wernher Von Braun won't have happened and consequentially the v-2 rocket engines and the "now working for the Americans" Lunar landing.
Without Musk we would not have Musk, which is a net benefit per se, if you ask me.
- Nov 21, 2022 - The Twitter boss laid off the workers late Sunday, further trimming a staff that has lost almost 5000 workers since Musk took over
- 07 Nov 2022 - Elon Musk Fires More Than 90% Of Twitter India Staff: Report
- Nov 17, 2022 - SpaceX fired 9 employees who organized an open letter describing Elon Musk's tweeting as a 'distraction and embarrassment,' report says
- May 20, 2022 - A SpaceX flight attendant said Elon Musk exposed himself and propositioned her for sex, documents show. The company paid $250,000 for her silence.
- In December, former SpaceX engineer Ashley Kosak published an essay meticulously detailing alleged sexual harassment at the company
- in June by a group of SpaceX employees releasing a statement saying Musk’s frattish behavior was “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment” and asking Musk to stop being, well, a creep
- ‘How Many Women Were Abused to Make That Tesla?’
Seven women are suing the Elon Musk-led company, alleging sexual harassment
the last one is particularly interesting as a story, the billionaire frat boy pretending people to love the company, love him, never openly criticize what he does and says, like he's an Egyptian Pharaoh (actually they were more tolerant towards their people)
And wear the S3XY Tesla pants, because Tesla is S3XY I guess... (－‸ლ)
How much more should we endure from someone who's clearly a sociopath before something really bad (O.J. 's style) happens?
of course he's saying that it's only a political campaign against him.
I'm not honestly convinced.
I will never understand the tendency to idolize bad people just because they had enough money to pull together something of dubious usefulness at best for the general public.
I often read heavy criticism against China here, but China is actually solving problems by manufacturing their affordable EVs, without having to rely on a billionaire deus ex machina to sell to the people as a savior.
it's not about infinite monkeys and sheer law of the large numbers, it's simply about progress.
Japan had smartphones in 1999.
Nokia had already made a few mildly successful attempts, they were very good on the tech side, they lacked the marketing strategy.
There's not much to re-discover, we all know how things went.
Nokia had 50% of the global market, but only 10% in the whole North America.
Americans have always preferred homemade products and iPhone is an US product.
Before that they preferred BlackBerry, which was North American.
Sometimes for Americans if something does not exists there, it does not exist period.
I, personally, was doing a-ok with non-smart phones and a different device to do the computing stuff and I strongly believe computing in general is in a worse place than in 2007.
Besides, people are still working for Elon Musk at Twitter, who is clearly a very bad boss, and the ones who are not anymore, are complaining for being fired and very few left on their own, literally no more than a dozen, which shows that people mostly do their job because they are paid to do it, not because they like the people paying them. They care about the salary, which is not worng.
I don't believe many people love Zuckerberg, yet Facebook/Meta has more than 80,000 employees working there and making the things Meta does possible.
Not because of strong leaders but because it's their job and they are paid (often times well, sometimes very well, sometimes awesomely well) to do it. Full stop. There's no need to romanticize the worker/employee relationship.
It's actually pretty bad for worker when people start believing that the you need leaders and the need to be strong (which usually means arrogant pricks, not emotionally and psychologically mature).
We are going to work, not to war.
The iPhone idea in Jobs mind was an iPod that could make phone calls, to sell more music to people. Then after many iterations with people who actually know what they are doing, it became the money machine it is, by incorporating the app store and the ads/apps selling business, which is the only true technical innovation iPhone brought to the table.
The consequences of those choices were easily imaginable, but were discarded because: making money over everything else.
So we now have kids depressed by the constant external pressure of having to fit in a model that is completely made up by rich people pretending that an infinity pool from the rooftop of a 5 star hotel in Singapore is the normal way to live and that promote beauty standards that are unnatural and unreachable.
If I had the power to chose, I would have chosen the infinite monkeys over Jobs and Musk every day of my life.
Please bear in mind that it's not just Jobs and Musk, it's not personal, the same is true for every so called strong leader a definition that their PR office attached to them and made it stick. A façade thoroughly crafted by people expert in rebranding other people. For money of course, not because they actually like their clients. On the contrary, they probably hate them. When these people are free to roam they act like Bezos going to space with a cowboy hat, while forcing Amazon's employees to pee in bottles, because that's who they really are.
Have you noticed the new likable, nerdy do-gooder Bill Gates public image?
And why is Bill Gates bad and Steve Jobs good? They did the same amount of unspeakable things, they broke the same laws, they evaded the same corporate taxes, they killed competition the same way, they sued individuals just because they could and had an infinite amount of money at their disposal.
At least Bill Gates is trying to defeat malaria, isn't he?
It's not a statement on how much he has to do with the achievements. It's a just one example of how the man lies almost constantly, and nothing he says can be trusted or relied upon.
Another great example would be the "$35k" Tesla, which existed only on paper for years, then was very difficult to order, then was pulled.
edit to add more detail: given Musk's history of unilaterally cancelling some individual's tesla orders, publishing car telemetry to dispute autopilot crash news stories, deciding when, how, and where Ukraine can use Starlink, and now plenty more examples of banning / censoring / downranking people as he sees fit on twitter, I'd prefer not to use a service he provides if i can get comparable capabilities somewhere else
Can you provide details of the order cancellation? That’s a new one.
Wasn’t the car telemetry only published because it went to court? Why are you upset with Musk when someone tries to defraud Tesla and they prove them wrong with data? No one else’s telemetry has been published. Meanwhile Uber have “god-mode” and can track every driver globally in realtime… and it was abused to stalk people.
SpaceX donated starlinks to Ukraine, and they did it ridiculously fast… Meanwhile Globalstar did nothing. And you’re upset with SpaceX for having some conditions? What were they that were so egregious?
What are the examples of banning? That are vastly different from pre-musk twitter. Do you mean the part where he banned people for releasing his real-time location? (After warning them, explaining it would get them suspended, and then doing it… and then reinstating them).
This super-villain narrative of Musk is hilariously comical. Where is it coming from?
- The other space companies are way worse than SpaceX and no one said anything
- The other car companies are way worse than Tesla and no one said anything
- Do we all remember Cambridge Analytica? But Musk cost cutting, and exposing internal workings of twitter is terrible for man kind.
It honestly feels like some kind of explicit narrative in a “Manufacturing Consent” kind of way. Why has the world turned on Musk?
“Why has the world turned on Musk?”. You seriously don’t know? He behaves like a dick. In public. Maybe the other space companies and car companies are worse, but Musk flaunts his dickishness. They do it on the quiet, with PR companies to whitewash their actions. Just because he does it in public doesn’t make him less of a dick though. Just makes him a very easy target.
Bezos acts like a dick too. His space company is materially worse in every way. Amazon is famous for being a shitty place to work. We don’t even know what influence he has on the Washington Post, because he does it in secret.
It’s weird you prefer it to be PR-whitewashed rather than just see it for what it is.
But pretending Elon is deserving of this attention is just lazy journalism… like he’s screaming from a megaphone what he’s doing… and journalists aren’t even looking at other billionaires/space companies/car companies that are up to worse activity than anything Elon is responsible for. (I’m not saying it excuses it, but it’s wasted attention)
He, and his companies deserve every bit of attention. You could argue others deserve just as much (and I'd agree). But no harm in exposing him for being a bigoted man-child, who control unproportional amount of wealth.
Amazon is shitty in shitty contexts, if you take Italy then every employee is unionised with benefits, in US you have this thing where you don’t want the government to be able to regulate but then expect companies to be good samaritan and foot the bill for maternity, sickness, public health, without paying taxes for it. Amazon is a good place, just need to regulate it
Companies aren't people. Companies whilst run by people are not acting in the best interest of people as a whole only a small subset of people(stakeholders). Just like criminal gangs and how they lead to some small subsets of people requiring policing(criminals), the same applies to companies(some companies and how they act towards the societies they operate in if regulations were better made and policed adequately would certainly be classed as criminals).
Just giving you some more info on that order cancellation, it's been a few years but from what I remember, a blogger/columnist complained pretty strongly about something that I can't remember like build quality and I think he did it in a way that bothered elon personally so he had the columnist's order cancelled.
> This super-villain narrative of Musk is hilariously comical. Where is it coming from?
For me it came from Musk downplaying COVID for financial gain.
Other than that, he's become proficient at discrediting himself as a reasonable, trustworthy person and presenting himself as a detached from reality lunatic who doesn't know when to stfu and how to behave.
When people like this have a lot (too much?) power that's when the super-villain vibe comes in.
Downplaying COVID was the only thing Musk was right. See Sweden not following WHO orders had small bump in excessive deaths. Also average age of dying with COVID was 84. There are no factory workers at Tesla that old.
I agree with everything you said but the reason people have turned on him is because he tweets like a dick too often and is really wealthy with lots of media exposure, not a small amount of it anti-Musk. Anyone that wealthy is going to get dragged in the media and when you mess with very powerful people's profits (Russia, defense contractors, American car manufacturers, and gasoline producers), you're really going to get dragged in the media. Plus the tweets.
Musk runs his businesses like a dictator. Well, OK, it's no secret multi billion companies is not where socialists go to hide. But he can't have it both ways: if he chooses to run his companies this way, he can't complain we pin the bad stuff on him. He is not only responsible, also clearly involved in making those choices and decisions.
I think part of my point is: In the context of each of his businesses, there isn’t really much bad stuff, in fact his businesses are much better across most metrics than his competitors.
Twitter might be the exception here because its early days.
I don't think it is the company CEO/Exec side that is drawing the heat- it is the " over-exposed, not behaving like an adult in public " part that is getting him in the cross-hairs.
And he seems to have disarmed the folks around him from helping with this.
I'm 99% sure I would dislike larry ellison more in person than Elon Musk, but the latter is on social media doing attention seeking stuff most days of the week. So I know more about what I dislike of Musk and any bad actions are front of mind.
> This super-villain narrative of Musk is hilariously comical. Where is it coming from?
That's easy: people who disagree with his recent political shift. It's extremely obvious, because I see it primarily among the progressives in my circle.
The Republican party is a Fascist party (Support for a Fascist President and supported a failed Coup) and Elon has voiced support for the Republican party, thus, Elon is a Fascist (AKA, Super Villain). It's does not take much to draw a line between the two.
> Yeah no, you don't get to dismiss half the population as "fascist".
The Republican Party isn't half the population, and, even if it was, it is quite possible for half or more the population of a country to support fascism. Popularity isn't a rebuttal to accusations of fascism.
I would hazard a guess that the billionaire class’s political views are not the same as regular people.
I don’t agree with what I understand Elons politics to be, but I can empathise. Tesla got screwed over by Covid restrictions in a completely arbitrary way in the US, which to me explains some of the anti-covid/right-wing-in-US stuff.
The US is caught up in a bit of polarised political environment that makes little sense from looking outside in.
The CIA, NSA, FBI, IRS, GRU, FSB, DIA, MI5/6/7/8 and most every other three-letter agency on the planet. They at least act rationally, are not prone to personal grudges, and care more about keeping secrets than protecting their shareholders.
Its your phone. You can control if it automatically connects to roaming. So you can opt out in the normal already existing way in your phone's settings.
This sounds to me like a single, global, commercial IMSI catcher that can track international movement of cell phones.. I guess the question is how good their triangulation will be, but I imagine the back-end data market for this will be fairly lucrative for them. And they don't really need any countries permission to _listen_ from space... .. .
The cool thing is that now you'll be able to cheaply monetize this information in order to better serve users with great perfectly-tailored advertising
It'll be like a cool guy is just following you around 24/7 making sure you know what to buy and do and think
haha, to be fair, that's exactly the kind of thing a lot of Facebook/Google employees would say unironically in a face to face conversation about ad tracking
There literally are, there's very good declassified evidence that has leaked out periodically in small pieces since the mid 1980s that some of what the NSA has are very large satellites with big unfolding umbrella-like antennas aimed directly down at the ground. For SIGINT collection and analysis. Or possibly some combination overlap between the black budget parts of the NRO and NSA.
Same size satellite bus as the largest class of things you would see in geostationary orbit (approx 6500 kg and the size of a school bus) but in high inclination orbits around 600 km.
> The satellites have estimated mass close to 5,200 kg and very large (estimated 100 m diameter)[2] radio reflecting dishes. USA-223 (NROL-32), which is seen as the fifth satellite in the series, is according to NRO director Bruce Carlson "the largest satellite in the world".[3] It is believed that this refers to the diameter of the main antenna, which might be well in excess of 100 m (330 ft).[4]
I've never bothered following the citations so I don't know how true this is, but it's pretty insane if it's real. A 100-meter-diameter satellite! I know it's an unfolding-umbrella-style mesh like you said, but still, that's impressive.
The giant unfolding umbrella antenna is not far off from what has been thoroughly commercially publicized for the unclassified commercial first and second gen Thuraya satellites (Boeing 702 bus).
Trevor Paglen has a pretty amazing talk that discusses finding and photographing some of these satellites. I've linked the specific part of the talk where he starts getting into this, but the entire thing is well worth a watch.
I wouldn't go that far. Rather I'd say that it opens up the risks and abuses to a much wider audience. I think the fact that there is no open source baseband firmware or open hardware for the GSM/LTE stack makes it even worse. There is no escape valve for consumers to exercise control over their privacy, and the technology doesn't care about regulatory boundaries, not that _any_ countries government actually wants that.
Currently Osmocombb can be considered a fully open source and audittable GSM stack, down to the baseband and modem firmware.
Too bad it does not fit the phone completely.
FreeCalypso does and is audittable, but it's licencing situation is murky at best. It's based on leaked Texas Instruments sources with a gpl licence stuck on top. But Calypso is essentially abandonware and TI got out of the GSM modem biz in early 2000's so they apparently don't care.
For LTE there's srsUE from Software Radio Systems, but it's a 100% SDR implementation that does not fot any phone and is more of a lab and research tool. But it is open and audittable.
Yep, and the modern day thing seems to be buying or hacking the movememt data directly from the telco. For example if leaks are to be believed NSA has access to around 70% of the movement data of GSM subscribers in Pakistan.
That said, there has been a sigint sat parked close below Thurayas sat for ages.
What are the chances of convincing a regulatory body to overturn laws mandating hard-coded hardware identifiers on a privacy basis? Probably not very good
Huh, I wonder how they manage to pick up the tiny amount of RF energy a normal phone can output from that far away, and through the noise of literally millions of other phones in the satellite's field of view.
Gotta be some real weird RF voodoo happening in there.
Cell phones can supposedly connect to towers up to 25 miles away (presumably at the slowest supported data rate.) Starlink is about 350 miles up. Let's round up to 400 to allow for satellites not being directly overhead. That's 2^4 times farther away, or 24dB of signal difference.
It seems like a sufficiently fancy phased antenna array on the satellite could compensate for that. Also, the atmosphere is 99% gone at 20 miles up, so that probably helps. Also, with the goal of only supporting SMS, a modern software defined radio chipset could probably be made to use an incredibly low data rate that adds more signal margin than currently used by any cell network.
I didn't realise that 4G/5G could connect to receivers that far away. From memory, the maximum Timing Advance in 2G corresponded to ~25km. After that the phones won't get ACKs fast enough due to speed of light and will assume that the response isn't for them.
WiFi has similar limits, but much shorter. I know some usecases of WiFi transceivers with longer distances (~5km) which required tweaked firmware that wasn't technically wifi-compliant, to have longer receive windows.
Even in 2G you have special cells that allocate two+ adjacent time-slots for a channel and so can effectively double the max range at the cost of serving less concurrent clients. This is used in sparsely populated regions (think remote highways etc). It's not a physical, the-signal-can't-reach issue.
You are correct - two things happening here:
1. Picking up RF energy from far away. This is the easy part - cell phone antennas are already a big compromise and can be improved on if you increase size or cost. Instead of omni-directional antennas and low-power amplifiers, a directional antenna and low noise amp will work wonders. Cell phones already have extra power to get through buildings and trees; in this case that power would be used to go extra distance (because there won't be these obstacles).
2. Many users seen at once. Each beam is only a 15-mile-diameter circle. In the really remote areas where this coverage would be needed, I don't suspect that there would be too many cell phones - maybe a few hundred at most.
It's strange that you think that this is so unachievable yet we have things like Bluetooth, WiFi, LoRa and regular cell phone all working with relatively tiny amounts of power and discriminating from the noise generated by other nonparticipants. This would amaze anyone from before the 70s.
What? My wifi barely reaches the other side of my room with a wall in between, how am I supposed to think 350 miles is within reason? Even with clear sky, your signal to a tower an order of magnitude closer would be unusable.
If you look at apple’s latest feature, even them, with specific hardware probably, requires minutes of open-sky pointing directly at the closest satellite, to transmit mere bytes of data.
That tells me that if your phone is just hanging in your pocket, indoors, with a 5G nearby, it’s not going to reach the satellite at in any shape or form.
I know nothing of your own situation, but having personally deployed fully working and operational WiFi for a 10000 plus seat stadium, various other campuses, but also seeing cell phones work in your pocket moving in a car or in a big city shopping centre is amazing. Even the Starlink stuff that is already deployed.
Anyway let's wait and see - I'm pretty sure T-Mobile wouldn't have signed on for something that is just a pipedream
Takes a much bigger radio to get the bandwidth for a starlink, 100mbs. Texting is on the order of bps. Garmin inreach mini is around the size of a tictac box and can send and receive texts.
They're nice, but shouldn't be needed. Ubiquitilink (mentioned as Lynk in the article) has proven 500km two-way connections without them. A large constellation at that height with large antennas and spectrum rights should be able to offer higher bandwidth service than Globalstar's current network offers to iPhones.
Globalstar's capabilities aren't frozen either. The Apple deal uses most of their capacity, but they'll be launching additional satellites. While they're not in the current deal, Globalstar could launch a lower LEO service in the future. Cell phones with bigger antennas, like the case antennas in the new iPhones, would have better sat service communicating at Starlink's range.
We're also in relatively early days of large antenna deployment. AST's record-setting antennas are going to look quaint as launch costs and more complicated deployments continue to advance and benefit every satellite network.
LoRa bitrate is very low and the range of LoRa is not even comparable with satellite communication. Moreover, normal smartphone are not LoRa compatible.
> LoRa provides for long-range communications: up to three miles (five kilometers) in urban areas, and up to 10 miles (15 kilometers) or more in rural areas (line of sight)
500km is one magnitude order more than the supposed range.
And no phone has a LoRa chipset inside, neither the new ones.
I always assumed the main thing with satellite messengers was that they transmit with much higher power. Not that such a system is easy to design, but the “voodoo” mentioned previously was more about achieving compatibility with an existing RF system at much longer ranges than the system was designed for.
Apples solution is in SOS emergency situations only. It is extremely limited in what you can transmit—which near as I can tell is just a well defined message format.
AFAIK only Lynk has demonstrated this capability so far. They're basically aiming for emergency two-way messaging and light downlink data like weather, emergency info, etc.
The others are talking about high speed data but haven't tested or demonstrated it from space that I know of. From what I understand it is not easy! I would be surprised if any of their data services launch commercially next year.
This will hopefully give Canadians real options for mobile phone plans. It will be "illegal" because our telecom monopoly (oligopoly) writes the laws, but presumably with a US address it will be possible, like it was with satellite dishes, to get a proper phone on a network that doesn't gouge you. I'll be curious what the monopoly does to try and fight it.
The satellites will surely have a certain amount of beam steering capability. (You need beamforming for this to work at all, I think.) If you're too far from the border, you may not be able to trick the system into believing you're in the US. (A lot depends on the implementation ... and what governments demand in terms of compliance.)
There are affordable plans in Canada. It's just that they aren't really advertised. I have unlimited Canadian talk+text + 2GB for $35/month. Without the data (just unlimited domestic text+voice) it's $20/month. This plan isn't public...for some reason my wife got emailed about it and she got signed up. They allowed me to sign up too, even though they hadn't notified me about it.
I think these plans are used to entice people on PAYG onto a plan, so they don't advertise them to everyone.
For roaming data+voice I use a BNEsim e-sim, which works very well.
Man, as a Canadian, I hate being put in the position of defending our wireless monopolies. But here goes.
That website seems... not great?
I think you got a 50x ratio by dividing the average prices of $0.12 (Italy) and $5.94 (Canada).
That appears to be a median...but I'd like to know how they chose the plans they used for the calculation. For example, Canada's maximum price is given as $46.02/GB. Perhaps such a plan is technically available, but I really doubt someone is using it for data, so it seems bizarre to include it in this data set.
For cheapest prices, they cite $0.05/GB for Italy and $1.66/GB for Canada. But off the top of my head, Rogers, which is the #1 telco in Canada, offers $0.74/GB. Seems... odd that it didn't make it into this dataset.
(And hey, I would like to know where I can pay $0.05 to get a GB/data in Italy. Full speed? On a good network?)
I pay $29/mo for unlimited data in Canada. Granted - with caveats! It gets throttled after the first 6 GB. I wonder if this would be counted as $4.83/GB in this survey? Their methodology PDF is unclear.
Fair enough, I reckoned the methodology on the website probably wasn't the best, and $/GB is a pretty bad metric to begin with.
I meant it mostly as an example of how there can be an order of magnitude of difference between prices, or at least half an order. I do concede my 50x number is probably very inaccurate in practice.
My family's plan is 80$/month for unlimited data for 6 devices, throttled after something like 60GB between all of them. Unused data can be used on the next month. Not once have I worried about reaching any limits, even with frequent Netflix and YouTube on the go and panic downloading Spotify albums before getting on a flight.
I'll pitch in my celluar plan for comparison (Taipei)
Currently I'm paying around US$16/mo for unlimited LTE data with a major celluar provider here, and have been doing so for the past 4-5 years.
(no, not unlimited with throttled cap, and with hotspot included)
And with recent 5G plans, unlimited plans (with 50GBs of unthrottled hotspot) can be had for effectively less than $30 a month, or even lower if you consider rebates for buying a phone on contract with them.
North American's celluar plans just seem so expensive.
That's the secrete good offer plan? Its extremely expensive. The same price in the Nordic countries would give you at least 20GB data and free roaming in all of EU.
Yes, I'm not defending Canada's high rates. It does indeed have much higher data rates than anywhere else, as can be seen on the BNEsim rates for various countries. I was just pointing out that you can get much cheaper rates than the advertised plans if you dig a little.
It's not exactly "satellite network", it's piggy-backing on an existing SAR reception infrastructure that used to require somewhat expensive dedicated devices.
Not sure it's a good idea, I'd expect a wave of SAR requests for not real emergencies.
While the consequences of easier communications when you get in trouble (or just get scared/tired) in the outdoors isn't intuitively obvious, SAR people I've chatted with generally seem to think that better comms is a net positive in that people can communicate before things get really dicey.
ADDED: There are also perhaps more common situations like going off the road in a snowstorm.
If I am getting this right, Apple and other device makers would have some kind of beacon registration for every single device it produces with the feature ?
I understand that a phone can receive a cellular signal from a satellite. But how can it transmit to a satellite given its limited transmission power (2-3 watts max)?
A few watts on a nice quiet channel will go many dozens of km just with old fashioned FM voice on handheld transceivers. Put a good directional antenna on one end and we're talking over a hundred km. As long as you have line of sight. A few hundred km line-of-sight is fairly unremarkable in itself. Iridium handsets are only like 2 W with compact omnidirectional antennas. Doing this with hardware and protocols not designed for it is pretty cool, though.
Worth noting these will be low-orbit satellites like StarLink (possibly even lower), which also gets over the latency problem (Starlink Satellites are at ~550km altitude - on the outer edge of the thermosphere, with a return trip latency of ~45ms; Geostationary satellites are 35,786km altitude, with a return trip latency of ~250ms)
We have become extremely good at detecting small signals. The extreme example is the DSN, which can still receive a signal from the Voyager probes of 10^-19 W.
Slightly different budget for the receiver though. But your average GPS receiver performs similar incredible feats of magic and those are very cheap now.
A VSAT terminal communicating with a geosynchronous satellite usually only use a 5Watt BUC (10W for higher bandwidth). These are of course mechanically pointed directly to the satellite, but the point being that you don’t need very high transmit power even when the target is 30000+ km up.
Ya know I am now realizing that I always assumed that I thought the link was phone -> tower -> satellite, and I’m just now realizing that that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
They are often off in the woods, though! Do some connect to satellites?
Edit: apparently satellite backhaul is a thing but kinda rare.
Bouncing off a geosynchronous satellite makes the latency awful, but it is an option. Fiber, copper, or point to point wireless are better options, though.
Latency for bouncing off LEO satellites isn't too bad though.
I have never heard of this misconception, but fixing the notoriously unreliable mobile coverage by turning existing phones into "satellite (internet!) phones" sounds wild
Location service uses gps (and similar satellite networks), cell and wifi info combined, so they are kind of not wrong. But it's not needed for "GPS" but it's hard to cut through the layers for people?
I often experience very slow time to fix with cell service off (& having location off beforehand) - I believe this is due to Assisted GNSS/GPS which significantly improves the time for GPS to start working (the associated Wikipedia article states that ~1 minute often without it, and worst case ~12.5 minutes)
Yeah, assisted GPS is great. I remember ye olde GPS consumer receivers taking minutes at a time to find a location while modern phones are of course much better and a lot of it is down to having a network connection to help out. It got so much better so fast that it's easy to forget how janky it could be!
A phone connection does help for downloading all the data you need to interpret the GPS signals. It's called assisted GPS. Without a connection, it can take upto a few minutes for a GPS receiver to figure out where it is.
I can't even describe how mindblowing all of this satcomm stuff is for me.
As a kid I grew up on 2600hz lore and the magic of the blue boxes, all of the witchcraft that went into making those insane switching infrastructures. How the world became so flat so fast is beyond my comprehension.
I was born a child without the Internet. We are now living in an age where the Internet is not only ubiquitous, but now increasingly omnipresent. We are dwelling in a saturation of signals the likes of which our ancestors could only dream of, but here we are today, in a world where we still have food crises, and individual autonomy conspiracies.
We have all of the signal, how do we cut through the noise?
I am excited by the helpers. The people who run towards the action and try to make a difference. The people who are working on healing the world.
Comms are the key to faster interactivity. I am delighted to see our species striving to have easier, faster, lower cost connectivity.
A mobile phone has a maximum power of 3W, the antenna is not directive and it's using frequencies in VHF bands. A Starlink satellite is orbiting at 400km.
As ham, I am seeing this communication very very difficult: even if it's LoS, mobile communications require high bitrates.
They're called 5G non-terrestrial networks (5G NTN) which sounds like science fiction. Ericsson, Thales, and Qualcomm work together, but they don't have any concrete plans to launch any satellites.
So there's Bluewalker 3 which uses a big antenna to achieve communications with unmodified cell phones, and then Elon claiming that regular Starlink satellites will be able to do the same thing without that ginormous antenna. How does that work? Both are at roughly similar altitudes, BW3 just slightly higher.
It's not "regular" Starlink satellites. They are going to launch new ones that do have a big antenna for this service. It's not as big as BlueWalker 3, and as a result the service is not as good. But it will work for texting and maybe voice calls.
There's a tradeoff between satellite size and satellite number and also bandwidth available. Both claims are likely equally true without any contradiction.
Also for the record, it's been previously mentioned that Starlink would equip an expandable 25 square meter antenna for this service. [1]
SpaceX is going for text messaging, AST SpaceMobile wishes to offer cellular broadband. This means it is probably designed for a higher bandwidth on cellular frequencies. Beyond that, bigger antennas mean better signal quality, so a better coverage.
Also, Starlink seems to be using an order of magnitude more satellites: AST SpaceMobile is planning a 243-satellite constellation, while Starlink currently has 3000+ satellites operational.
Wonders what kind of change this will have to society as a whole?
Global internet from space that is big! What will happen if a sub $50 mobile can receive wikipedia globaly? What payment systems will be built? The whole africa continent will be connected.
Unless we get a nuclear exchange, then the starlink chains will drive into each other - and dual use, form a protective shrapnel cloud around the earth stopping ICBMs, explaining the recent hype on fast missiles that can dodge these clouds..
True enough. We have a cabin in the middle of nowhere in Washington, and there’s just enough signal to call or text for help but not enough for anyone to browse Instagram or check email. Something magical happens when we invite people out there. For the first hour or two, you notice folks sneaking off and holding their phones high. After a while, everyone gives up and the rest of the weekend we’re all present where we are. I’ll be pretty sad the day that stops happening, obvious benefits aside.
Usually, these satellites fly over 500km altitude, and as far as I know, none of the nation-states can take them down due to the limited rocket science capacity.
The U.S. successfully shot down a satellite at that altitude in 1985 with an F-15 and a specially designed missile. Are they all 35 years behind? I don't think that's a good assumption.
Well, the thing is that Starlink satellites are launched in 50+ piece batches about every other week. This makes them uneconomical to attack, not to mention the horrendous debris issues it would cause, destroying likely also your own satellites.
Well, Wall-E's skyscape seems really quick coming to the reality. Not long after it might not be easy to enjoy a view of the night sky in the backyard.
im just left wondering what will happen if i use a phone like that in the basement. I really have no use for the satelite feature, but i recon, not being able to connect is the same as a phone trying to find coverage. read: very battery intensive.
I recon its like gps, not available in a tunnel and not very well indoors
>“Everything about a phone is built around time-synching on the order of 5 to 10 milliseconds,” Wisniewski says. “That works just fine with a tower that’s a quarter mile away, 3 miles away even, but not for orbit.”
You know, that's an excellent point...
I'm guessing (but not knowing!) -- that the farther a signal needs to be synched in space -- deep space for example -- the larger possible "time interval" / "time skew" / "time jitter" (for lack of better terminology, I am not a signal engineer!) -- between signal components!
Consider the following question in theoretical physics:
Let's suppose someone could choose a point in the universe, all the way across the universe (like let's suppose the universe is like a circle, and the point chosen is diametrically opposite to where you are now -- the farthest point opposite your own, on the circle's circumference.)
And let's suppose you could send a radio signal from this most far point in the universe -- and somehow receive it where you are now...
If you could -- then the $64,000 question is:
"What does that radio signal look like at the endpoint, once it has traversed all of that space?"
Because it probably has been transformed in some way, before it reaches its destination...
Maybe it has not only become phase shifted and/or time skewed -- in some way...
Perhaps that signal, by the time it reaches the longest point in the universe away from it -- has been completely Fourier Transformed...
If most of that signal at its point of origin was originally in the frequency domain (like most signals are) -- then perhaps that signal, in its journey over miles and miles of endless space -- is now mostly in the time domain...
Or, I'll go for "full crackpot" --
Perhaps what defines the largest possible distance between two points in space -- is the Fourier Transform of all signals present in one point in space/time -- Fourier transformed -- at another point in space/time...
(Or perhaps I should call space/time -- time/space -- its reciprocal/inverse ?)
But perhaps this is all wrong!
Perhaps the opposite to a point in space -- is all other points in Space!
Or, all other points in Time...
Well, whatever the case, it would be interesting to know what signal transformations are necessary to get a given signal the farthest to/from deep space...
At least for future, outside of our solar system, space missions...
>"What does that radio signal look like at the endpoint, once it has traversed all of that space?"
Exactly the same, just much weaker.
The issue at play is just that light moves at a finite speed, and cell phones would rather assume the tower is dead (and switch to a closer tower) than wait a long time to get an answer. Not physics, just software.
How is the Chinese government going to control the flow of information in China once all phones do this and traffic need not leave the Starlink network to allow communication between endpoints?
Sure. We could roll-out the infra, but can you imagine?
I give you $20, and I go to jail if I don't mark down the serial, and report it. Or, if I cannot account for where serial $x went to, after it was given to me.
All stores, etc have to do the same.
People would freak out if told to do this.
Yet this is precisely what is happening with debit/credit cards worldwide. This level of tracking is slowly begin kicked on everywhere.
For example, by law, the DHS in the US has access to all credit(and effectively debit, which uses the same clearing process) transactions.
The US just rolled over after 9/11, completely bizarre.
Realistically, when such systems roll out they happen to easily regulatable entites (shops) and not to private people. So every costco or bank would have a machine to track the bills by number and it would go from there. Not that I want this to happen, but it's perfectly imaginable.
Yeah, the floodgates of information into surveillance, they are just completely open and people are way past caring. It's just too much to understand. And like Snowden says, of all that "metadata", you don't need much of it to do the meaningful tracking you need.
It's achieved by "dedicating a slice of T-Mobile's Mid-Band PCS [1.9 GHz] spectrum, to be integrated into Starlink satellites, launched next year", with each Starlink V2 satellite hosting two 5-6 meter long cell-spectrum antennas, in addition to the existing Ka- and Ku-band antennas.
They're aiming for the US with the trial, and growing to global coverage by entering into reciprocal roaming agreements with the international carriers who hold licences to the relevant mid-band spectrum.
Elon Musk says "this won't have the kind of bandwidth that a Starlink terminal would have, but it will enable texting. It will enable images. And if there aren't too many people in the in the cell-zone, you could even potentially have a little bit of video."
Musk claims 2 to 4 megabits per cell-zone, 1000-2000 simultaneous voice calls per cell-zone, with the cell-zone of course being much larger than a terrestrial cell-tower.
[1] https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-cove...
[2] https://youtu.be/F8zS2rU-URo?t=325