Could We Provide Better Cellphone Service With Fewer, Bigger Satellites? (reuters.com) 37
European satellite operator Eutelsat "plans to launch 440 Airbus-built LEO satellites in the coming years to replenish and expand its constellation," Reuters reported Friday. And last week America's Federal Communications Commission approved SpaceX's request to deploy another 7,500 Starlink satellites, while Starlink "projects it will eventually have a constellation of 34,000 satellites," writes Fast Company, and Amazon's Project Leo "plans to launch more than 3,200 satellites."
Meanwhile "Beijing and some Chinese companies are planning two separate mega-constellations, Guowang and G60 Starlink, totaling nearly 26,000 satellites," and this week the Chinese government "applied for launch permits for 200,000 satellites."
But a small Texas-based company called AST SpaceMobile "believes it can provide better service with fewer than 100 gigantic satellites in space." AST SpaceMobile has developed a direct-to-cell technology that utilizes large satellites called BlueBirds. These machines use thousands of antennas to deliver broadband coverage directly to standard mobile phones, says the company's president, Scott Wisniewski. "This approach is remarkably efficient: We can achieve global coverage with approximately 90 satellites, not thousands or even tens of thousands required by other systems," Wisniewski writes in an email...
The key is its satellites' size and sophistication. AST's first generation of commercial satellite, the BlueBird 1-5, unfolds into a massive 693-square-foot array in space. Today, the company has five operational BlueBird 1-5 satellites in orbit, but its ambitions are much bigger. On December 24, 2025, AST launched the first of its next-generation satellites from India — called Block 2 — and this one broke records. The BlueBird 6 has a surface of almost 2,400 square feet, making it the largest single satellite in low Earth orbit. The company plans to launch up to 60 more by the end of 2026. "This large surface area is essential for gathering faint signals from standard, unmodified mobile phones on the ground," Wisniewski explains. It is essentially a single, extremely powerful and sensitive cell tower in the sky, capable of serving a huge geographical area...
To be clear, AST SpaceMobile's approach is not without its own controversies. The sheer size of the company's satellites makes them incredibly bright in the night sky, a significant source of frustration for ground-based astronomers. McDowell confirms that when it launched in 2022, AST's prototype satellite, BlueWalker 3, became "one of the top 10 brightest objects in the night sky for a while."
"It's a serious issue, and we are working directly with the astronomy community to mitigate our impact," Wisniewski says. The company is exploring solutions like anti-reflective coatings and operational adjustments to minimize the time its satellites are at maximum brightness...
AST SpaceMobile has already proven its technology works, the article points out, with six working satellites now transmitting at typical 5G speeds directly to regular phones.
Meanwhile "Beijing and some Chinese companies are planning two separate mega-constellations, Guowang and G60 Starlink, totaling nearly 26,000 satellites," and this week the Chinese government "applied for launch permits for 200,000 satellites."
But a small Texas-based company called AST SpaceMobile "believes it can provide better service with fewer than 100 gigantic satellites in space." AST SpaceMobile has developed a direct-to-cell technology that utilizes large satellites called BlueBirds. These machines use thousands of antennas to deliver broadband coverage directly to standard mobile phones, says the company's president, Scott Wisniewski. "This approach is remarkably efficient: We can achieve global coverage with approximately 90 satellites, not thousands or even tens of thousands required by other systems," Wisniewski writes in an email...
The key is its satellites' size and sophistication. AST's first generation of commercial satellite, the BlueBird 1-5, unfolds into a massive 693-square-foot array in space. Today, the company has five operational BlueBird 1-5 satellites in orbit, but its ambitions are much bigger. On December 24, 2025, AST launched the first of its next-generation satellites from India — called Block 2 — and this one broke records. The BlueBird 6 has a surface of almost 2,400 square feet, making it the largest single satellite in low Earth orbit. The company plans to launch up to 60 more by the end of 2026. "This large surface area is essential for gathering faint signals from standard, unmodified mobile phones on the ground," Wisniewski explains. It is essentially a single, extremely powerful and sensitive cell tower in the sky, capable of serving a huge geographical area...
To be clear, AST SpaceMobile's approach is not without its own controversies. The sheer size of the company's satellites makes them incredibly bright in the night sky, a significant source of frustration for ground-based astronomers. McDowell confirms that when it launched in 2022, AST's prototype satellite, BlueWalker 3, became "one of the top 10 brightest objects in the night sky for a while."
"It's a serious issue, and we are working directly with the astronomy community to mitigate our impact," Wisniewski says. The company is exploring solutions like anti-reflective coatings and operational adjustments to minimize the time its satellites are at maximum brightness...
AST SpaceMobile has already proven its technology works, the article points out, with six working satellites now transmitting at typical 5G speeds directly to regular phones.
Arguably, yes (Score:4, Interesting)
A larger satellite can have a larger signals collecting area, can have much more sophisticated electronics, can have better shielding against radiation, and (if it uses solar panels) can have substantially larger panels because it'll have the fuel to manoever.
Now, whether or not these particular large satellites are better, proof is in the pudding. Clearly, they're still being idiots about reflectivity. (Yes, you've got to get rid of the heat, and that's best done in a direction that doesn't worsen your altitude, but there's ways to do this that don't interfere with astronomy,)
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Armor? LOL, no, do the math. (Score:2)
Potential energy is 0.5 * mass * velocity squared.
Re:Armor? LOL, no, do the math. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you mean "kinetic".
And while I understand your point, there is more to "armour" than a simple energy calculation. Current "armour" used in space to protect satellites are much more sophisticated than throwing up a thick sheet of metal. While there is an incredible amount of energy in space debris, the current designs that defend against this energy is to utilize multiple layers of material to force the debris/projectile to break upon contact with the first layer, so that subsequent layers only need to deal with fine particulates.
Considerations are also made bout the geometry of these layers. Should they be laid out so potential projectiles impact the surface at a 90-degree angle? Or should they be angled? Current designs have been tested where multiple layers are angled differently, so that sub-layers can continuously "refract" the debris cloud away from its incident angle, and force the brunt of the resulting debris away at an extremely slanted angle relative to the protected surface.
While these types of "multi-layered debris defence" won't protect against larger debris, larger satellites will have enough mass, and therefore inertia, to be affected far less by impacts of smaller pieces of space debris. So, if a type of shielding can be added that can absorb the bottom 90% of space-debris mass, it could make financial sense to do so, especially if these larger satellites are able to carry more fuel for course corrections.
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A larger satellite can have a larger signals collecting area, can have much more sophisticated electronics, can have better shielding against radiation, and (if it uses solar panels) can have substantially larger panels because it'll have the fuel to maneuver.
Sure, but make these "communication satellites" too big and countries may be tempted to secretly hide weapons inside them, maybe even nuclear warheads, then if/when those satellites malfunction, a crew of, say, Space Cowboys [wikipedia.org] will have to be sent to service them, only then discovering the truth and hopefully saving us all from certain disaster. Sure, it sounds unimaginable, but ... :-)
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It's so unimaginable, that was an episode of Thunderbirds Are Go.
Iridium tried this (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Iridium tried this (Score:4, Interesting)
LEO Iridium phone calls had too much latency to really feel natural for me. Unless these new sats are going to be even lower orbit, I doubt new fancy electronics are going to fix much.
Unless AI speech prediction is waaaay better than I think - to the point where it can finish both sides of the conversation early.
But if that's the case, what's the point of a call at all?.
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A smaller constellation means they're going to be much more careful about the satellites they have in orbit. Contrast to the Starlink style of operations where they've asset-written-off the satellite after 5 years, so it can burn up and they don't mind - they'll just launch a dozen new ones.
Whilst the burn-up-and-replace option may be cheaper/simpler, it sure is wasteful - and despite what some say, carbon emissions are costing us a lot. No one knows for sure what the atmospheric cost of the burn-ups is, bu
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I was thinking mostly the launch as being where the carbon comes from (although aluminium smelting to the grades used is also carbon intensive, as are creation of some of the other things used to make the satellite). After that, there's suggestion that aluminium in our upper atmosphere could be really bad for us, as would other chemicals used to make up the satellites - but as things stand, we don't really know for sure what that's all going to do to us - it's a safe bet to suggest it's not going to be good
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Aluminum concentrations are already rising in the atmosphere. https://cires.colorado.edu/new... [colorado.edu]
Launching more satellites *every year* than have ever been launched is going to cause the Kessler cascade/syndrome.
Which will stop us from accessing space, at all, for at least a few decades. No more hurricane warnings.
Humanity needs to stop letting billionaires play with our only lifeboat.
"better" (Score:4, Insightful)
>"Could We Provide Better Cellphone Service With Fewer, Bigger Satellites?"
Define "better". Better than more smaller satellites? Better than land-based systems?
As an augmentation to land-based systems, satellite service can be a great boon. But it is also a scary "single point of failure" issue. Satellite service is easier to jam/block, will suffer from space-based radiation, requires more device power, has sky-visibility issues, and considering the apparent space hostility, easy to knock out a few targets and leave absolutely huge swaths of non-coverage. And replacing such a mega satellite will be very expensive and time-consuming.
Latency and uptime (Score:3, Interesting)
With 90 sats, each one has to cover 1% of the globe. Break out your trigonometry and you'll figure out that in the extreme edge of a coverage cell, minimum range is 1000 miles. Assuming you can talk to it just over the horizon. Spoiler alert: you can't and that's going to make the max range at the end of coverage bigger.
This is in contrast to starlink where there's always one almost overhead and less than 500 miles away.
The extra up to 1000 miles round trip (500 up and 500 down, not counting differences in intersatelite link distance) is an extra 5 msec of latency. Doesn't matter for voice or text or even probably video, but there's probably some application where it's going to be the last straw. Remote controlled drones or delivery robots or something. Idunno.
As another poster mentioned, having a good view of the sky is required here. With 90 satellites, having one go overhead is a rare event. Most of the time your signal will be blocked by buildings, terrain, or clouds adding along the line of sight just over the horizon.
Re: Latency and uptime (Score:1)
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Agreed. While you are outdoors and up high, sure, might be great.
If you are indoors, in a building, in a basement, in a low valley, or generally any location that has a limited or zero view of the sky, I don't see how this will work.
Homes have horizontal views out windows, which can allow signals to pass more easily, whereas one or two floors of various ceiling and floor material, especially if you have a solar or metal roof, it gonna kill your signal to a satellite 1000 miles in the sky. Or burn your head
Reflectivity (Score:2)
Presumably, irrespective of optical coatings added, these satellites will be highly reflective in the radio bands where it operates.
Radio astronomers might have something to say about that too.
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Presumably, irrespective of optical coatings added, these satellites will be highly reflective in the radio bands where it operates. Radio astronomers might have something to say about that too.
Both radio and optical astronomers would prefer fewer larger satellites to more smaller satellites, because the number of events where they need to turn off their observation is proportional to the number of satellites.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
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The key is service density . . . (Score:3)
. . . and that means we’re a long way from replacing most cell towers.
A key limitation is that cell phones generate very weak signals, which significantly lowers the achievable density. For example, look at StarLinks’s latest generation, V3, where each satellite projects multiple 400 km^2 coverage beams. Each beam can only service a limited amount of phones before the phones start interfering with each other. It’s maybe a hundred active phones per beam if each phone’s bandwidth is kept low. Planned upgrades and standards will likely up the density by 10X or even a 100X, but this is still orders of magnitude below what an urban cell tower can handle. It only makes economic and practical sense across rural areas, oceans, etc.
So “Could we provide better cell phone service with fewer, bigger satellites?”. In short, “yes but”.
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The "thousands of antennas" are supposed to work around that, presumably by allowing much better beam-steering (narrower beams and attenuated sidelobes; the alternative is that they're fixed-beam antennas). The trade-off is that it requires a lot more processing power to steer the beams, even more processing if they're doing it in the digital domain (which they presumably are), and a tighter beam is less able to adapt to dynamics of the user -- managing a static velocity isn't hard, but variable accelerati
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I 100% agree better beam steering, etc, certainly helps, but I doubt this is early enough of an orders magnitude improvement to solve the urban density problem - and we haven’t even touched on the problem of punching a cell phone’s signal directly to a satellite through a skyscraper. I suspect we’re decades away from a satellite-only solution - if ever.
Kessler syndrome (Score:2)
Did you learn nothing from the movie Gravity? Kessler syndrome https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
MAINFRAMES in (Score:2)
SPAAAACE!!!
as long as it's the Biggest, most Beautiful Satell (Score:2)
Also make sure there a squadron of Imperial Tie Fighters to defend it, cause the Rebels are coming.
It depends on what you consider "better" (Score:2)
You can do it with geostationary satellites. You can get away with 3 or 4 for global coverage easily. With Iridium you can get global coverage, you could even get things like ISDN channels for video telephony. The demand for this has decreased not that terrestrial mobile telephony networks now offer a very decent coverage.
However the problem with "cellphone" service today is usually not coverage, but capacity. That's why typically you try to make cell phone cells as small as possible.
No (Score:2)
gathering faint signals from standard, cell phones (Score:2)
Mute point when it has a software glitch.... (Score:2)
Yes. (Score:2)
Here's my proposal: stop all these launches. Put up 24 *large* satellites, up at say about 500mi/~800km. Send up manned ships to attach new commercial systems to it - which would be much cheaper, since it would provide power and stationkeeping - and remove old ones, rather than dumping them back on us.
No Kessler Syndrome. No garbage filling the skies for astronomers.