AT&T Helps Complete the First 'Space-Based Voice Call' Using a Standard Smartphone (engadget.com) 34
Satellite manufacturer AST SpaceMobile partnered with AT&T to make the first two-way audio call using satellites with a standard smartphone. "The initial call was placed using AT&T's networks in Midland, Texas, to mobile carrier Ratuken in Japan on an unmodified Samsung Galaxy S22 smartphone using AST SpaceMobile's BlueWalker 3 satellite," reports Engadget. AST SpaceMobile claims to be building "the first and only space-based cellular broadband network." From the report: AT&T aims to use satellites to provide global cellular broadband from 2G to 5G. "Achieving what many once considered impossible, we have reached the most significant milestone to date in our quest to deliver global cellular broadband from space," Abel Avellan, CEO and chairman of AST SpaceMobile, said in a release. "While we take a moment to celebrate this tremendous accomplishment, we remain focused on the path ahead and pivotal next steps that get us closer to our goal of transforming the way the world connects."
It's unclear whether satellite access would come at an extra cost. In AT&T's original AST SpaceMobile partnership announcement, the company couldn't say whether existing plans would include satellite coverage. [...] While satellite offerings aren't available for consumers yet, this successful test brings widespread access one step closer to becoming a reality.
It's unclear whether satellite access would come at an extra cost. In AT&T's original AST SpaceMobile partnership announcement, the company couldn't say whether existing plans would include satellite coverage. [...] While satellite offerings aren't available for consumers yet, this successful test brings widespread access one step closer to becoming a reality.
Re:5G or satellite - pick one (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not really true. I mean the part about altitude is true (that one is between 417 and 476km up, I think), but 5G is an encoding, and AFAIK nothing *inherently* prevents a 5G signal from working at longer distances.
There are several reasons that 5G is limited to short distances when talking to traditional cell towers:
But when you're talking about a single test to a single phone from a single satellite, presumably performed on your own private chunk of spectrum so that you can turn off all other 5G traffic within Doppler effect distance of the chosen channel for every tower and cell phone within a 500 mile radius of the test site, the first and third reasons don't matter, and when the phone is outdoors and the "tower" is a satellite overhead rather than horizontally, the second reason doesn't matter, either.
Whether the technology can be made usable for millions of devices within a small geographical area or not is a different question, of course. Doing so is likely to require sophisticated multi-satellite beamforming, which is massively more complicated than pulling off a single test for a single device.
Either way, multiple satellite vendors are expecting to start testing this sort of thing this year, so this isn't exactly a shock. :-)
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But for that you would install a tower. If temporary, a ground-based 5G tower with a satellite uplink [denvergazette.com].
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But for that you would install a tower. If temporary, a ground-based 5G tower with a satellite uplink [denvergazette.com].
Okay, millions was an exaggeration, and you're right that the right solution there is a tower. But the problem begins at a much smaller number than millions, or even tens of thousands.
From the ground, small is a square mile, and you can get the SNR needed with beamforming to narrow that down to a really tiny area.
From space, small is half a degree of arc, which if you aren't straight overhead, could easily be an elongated oval that's five or ten miles across in the long direction. And that's the beamforme
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Re: 5G or satellite - pick one (Score:2)
By lowering every device's transmission power
And therein lies the problem. In order to maximize phone to tower bandwidth for multiple users, you have to cut the power and put in more towers, closer together. So, fewer users per tower. Now if everyone starts taking through a single passing satellite, the bandwidth per user has to go way down. And that will cause a serious bottleneck if this service is offered for standard voice/data service. One autistic little gamer will clog the whole system up.
Apple has the right idea (used recently in a rescue of
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Apple has the right idea (used recently in a rescue of several people in a sink-hole). Satellite text only service. Usable for emergencies, but you don't raise the expectations of daily users that they can now do cat videos from the wilderness.
They really don't have the right idea. I have trouble with poor signal in the heart of Silicon Valley in some areas, particularly if you get up into the hills. And that's with LTE. 5G is only going to make the problem worse. 5G service in my home town in Tennessee? No chance. There's one tower every 30 miles or so. The only prayer of getting semi-usable service in those areas is with beamforming satellites.
The design of 5G with its limited transmission power likely precludes deployment outside of maj
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I am 10 km from a tower and my phone sometimes hits a 5G panel.
You are confusing the protocol with the data capacity and range of transmission bands. 5G can be implemented on all of the bands used for LTE but data rates are constrained by frequency of the bands, and as band frequency increases data capacity goes up but object penetration goes down. Practically speaking this means hundreds of metres or less in an urban area for the higher bands. Trees and leaves are effective RF shields above a couple
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If you really want long-distance transmissions (way farther than satellites) use 36 MHz band - plenty of bandwidth for a SIP phone call, and massive range. The issue is in electrical engineering and ability to make transceiver small and powerful enough to fit as an SMD component.
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It's not that high band signal stops working at some small distance, it very much doesn't. The problem is visibility, high frequencies are more easily blocked and scattered by obstacles t
Re: Big deal, on 911 people made calls with GSMs (Score:2)
But that was between the phone and base stations on the ground.
Rakuten, you numbnuts (Score:2)
Re: Rakuten, you numbnuts (Score:2)
Better article (Score:5, Informative)
https://spacenews.com/ast-spac... [spacenews.com]
The original article is damn near useless. Turns out the satellite uses a large phased array to complete the call. No idea how many calls it can handle simultaneously or what effect that will have on costs.
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Or if it still works when indoors, which the vast majority of us are at most points throughout the day.
Get this to work from the 20th floor of a 45-floor skyscraper in New York while about 300,000 other people within a half-mile radius are also trying to place calls in the same situation and you might have something.
Re: Better article (Score:2)
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They will if the "edge case" is the only one that would pay sufficient premium. Manhattan is already saturated with LTE .. this service is instead needed out in the ocean or in rural areas where there is no cell phone coverage by towers.
Just what we need (Score:1)
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Starlink has thousands
Phased array gain is not magic. (Score:3)
The real question is how many phased array elements are used by the satellite in the test, which describes its maximum theoretical gain. The FCC report linked below shows 36dBi for the service links and 45dBi for the gateway link. The use of gateway and service link signify the use of a multibeam approach, which means that a ground station of some sort must have been used during the test (that is, not merely purely cell phone direct to satellite).
https://fcc.report/ELS/AST-Sci... [fcc.report]
Ouch (Score:2)
Re: Ouch (Score:2)
"Over!" (Score:2)
My first technical job was installing car phones so I was exposed to these multi-thousand-dollar devices whereas few people were at the time. In my opinion, the analog quality was better. So when the systems went to digital, my customers noticed and yelled and cursed at me!
I proved the point with a friend who had a phone that could make calls over digital or ana
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Re: Ouch (Score:2)
It may come as a shock to you, but there are places without cell towers.
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A lot easier to knock out a central landline switching station than thousands of satellites.
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As of this same date, there are 2,793 of the 3,055 satellites still in orbit. A large number of satellites from the Starlink Group 4-7 were lost to a geomagnetic storm. New groups of satellites will also need to be launched to replace older units that are outdated or damaged by orbital decay. SpaceX is constantly working on improving the technology to reduce the effect of orbital decay and extend the lifespan of the Starlink satellites.
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cellular? (Score:2)
How can satellite networks be "cellular"? Is that doable with the phased array mentioned in another comment?