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Communications Cellphones

Starlink Launches First 'Cellphone Towers In Space' For Use with LTE Phones (arstechnica.com) 38

Posted by BeauHD from the first-of-many dept.
SpaceX launched a total of 21 satellites on Tuesday night, including "the first six Starlink satellites with Direct to Cell capabilities that enable mobile network operators around the world to provide seamless global access to texting, calling, and browsing wherever you may be on land, lakes, or coastal waters without changing hardware or firmware. The enhanced Starlink satellites have an advanced modem that acts as a cellphone tower in space, eliminating dead zones with network integration similar to a standard roaming partner," the company said. Ars Technica reports: Besides T-Mobile in the US, several carriers in other countries have signed up to use the direct-to-cell satellites. SpaceX said the other carriers are Rogers in Canada, KDDI in Japan, Optus in Australia, One NZ in New Zealand, Salt in Switzerland, and Entel in Chile and Peru. While SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote that the satellites will "allow for mobile phone connectivity anywhere on Earth," he also described a significant bandwidth limit. "Note, this only supports ~7Mb per beam and the beams are very big, so while this is a great solution for locations with no cellular connectivity, it is not meaningfully competitive with existing terrestrial cellular networks," Musk wrote.

Starlink's direct-to-cell website says the service will provide text messaging only when it becomes available in 2024, with voice and data service beginning sometime in 2025. Starlink's low Earth orbit satellites will work with standard LTE phones, unlike earlier services that required phones specifically built for satellite use. SpaceX's direct-to-cell satellites will also connect with Internet of Things (IoT) devices in 2025, the company says.
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Starlink Launches First 'Cellphone Towers In Space' For Use with LTE Phones More

Starlink Launches First 'Cellphone Towers In Space' For Use with LTE Phones

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  • Oh, Boy! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @05:03AM (#64130265)

    Now astronauts can get covid in space. And maybe also the aliens that are here to spy on us.

    • Re:Oh, Boy! (Score:4, Funny)

      by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @05:09AM (#64130281)

      Damn, you beat me to it!

      But still, I can add that even hiding in some remote parts of the planet will not protect you anymore from the COVID beamed down from these LEO satellites! I guess the people fearing that need to suicide to protect themselves now...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )

      Now astronauts can get covid in space.

      No, no, you've got it all wrong. It's 5G that causes COVID. These satellites do LTE, which is just ordinary mind control; tinfoil hats can take care of that easily.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What nonsense. This CANNOT give anyone COVID. Everyone knows that 5G microcells cause COVID, and this is LTE (4G) with large cells.

      It gives you a bad flu instead, obviously, and as we know COVID is NOT a bad flu.

      Man, it's amazing what kind of disinformation people will post on the Internet these days.

    • The point of satcom internet is not to cover urban areas, but non-covered areas.
      It also gives a healthy competition pressure to monopolistic operators.

      • Re:Competition pressure (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Rei ( 128717 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @06:47AM (#64130441) Homepage

        To be fair, these aren't really competition for ground-based towers. They're VERY low bandwidth. Everyone in a circle dozens of kilometers in diameter shares the same weak-signal 7Mbps link.

        You ever hear people brush off articles about new compression methodologies (audio, images, video, etc), saying who cares, why would anyone want to waste more compute when storage and bandwidth are so abundant today? Well, this is exactly the sort of use case for those sorts of things.

        • Ya gotta start somewhere. The biggest hurdle in all of this is Christian Doppler, who still haunts us to this day even though he never knew what an electromagnetic wave was. And making this happen with something as low power as a mobile phone at that highly variable velocity and distance is quite a feat of antenna engineering. The first major win will come from those spot beams and the hexagonal cells they cover getting a lot smaller within the next few years. And over time the antennas should further impro

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

        Half the morons on here still think Starlink is intended to compete with their urban fiber optic internet connections. So I'm not surprised they're equally confused by this.

    • The handful that can feel those cellular waves invading their brains, this can only mean one thing: no more space travel for you

      • Provocateur isn't real. He's only a figment of my imagination. Don't look. He isn't real. He's only real if I look. Don't read. I mustn't read. It'll only make it worse. Provocateur isn't real. He's only a figment of my imagination. Don't look. He isn't real. He's only real if I look. Don't read. I mustn't read. It'll only make it worse. Provocateur isn't real. He's only a figment of my imagination. Don't look. He isn't real. He's only real if I look. Don't read. I mustn't read. It'll only make it worse.

  • Enough for a voice call (Score:3)

    by TomGreenhaw ( 929233 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @07:52AM (#64130565)
    It seems to me the killer app here is allowing people in the middle of nowhere to make an emergency voice call.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by billyswong ( 1858858 )
      Only if that nowhere is within a region Lord Musk approves. Counter-example: Crimea.

    • Given the available bandwidth, text seems more likely, with any number of users.

      Being able to text from anywhere, even when there is no terrestrial signal, would be a phenomenal improvement.

    • To me the killer app is simply being able to send and receive a text. The crucial difference is "something" vs "nothing."

      The Personal Locator Beacon I carry now doesn't even allow me to send a text, it just sends a signal that implicitly means "help!!!" and it doesn't receive anything at all. You push the button and then wait for an indeterminate time to see who, if anybody, shows up.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • So basically, these will be satphones?

    I hope they don't charge satphone _prices_ for the service. Yeep.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 )

      This is not about Sat Phones at all.

      This is about being able to drive into the middle of nowhere with your existing phone, and still have it work - albeit at a lower bandwidth rate, but at least it works.

      Carriers will probably charge a nominal fee for "Satelite roaming" or something like this but it would not be anything like what Iridium charges. Also this isn't totally competitive with Iridium yet because it doesn't work anywhere on earth. But eventually this will probably put them out of business.

    • No. This just means you'll be able to send a text message with a regular phone when you get lost in the mountains. It's pretty neat for the outdoorsy types.

  • Just maybe this will bring competition to roaming charges. $5 a day just to use my number while roaming. What a joke!

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