Note: the bandwidth is around 7Mbs per "beam" and the "beams" are 40-100km in radius, so very large. This isn't a replacement for traditional cell service, but specifically designed for emergency service in remote areas. This service will work with all phone equipped with LTE (4G).
With how many cell-phone providers and towers out there, I have no doubts they'll all be up to their eyeballs in work on this. Also, SpaceX just lost funding and might be trying to pick up some of the rural broadband funds Lynk and ASTS are going for: https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-loses-appeal-to-receive-88...
Satellite phones have been a thing since the 1980s, and at least a dozen companies are operating some form of commercial 3G/4G/5G satellite services today that you can use on your phone or an IoT modem. Apple recently enabled this as well on iPhone 14 (via Globalstar). The article is about the first Starlink satellites with phone service, not the first overall.
It's interesting how the phrasing in the headline leads to different readings of its meaning. I read it as "SpaceX launches [their] first phone service satellites" which is how I think the author meant it. The first sentence clarifies:
>SpaceX launched a rocket on Tuesday carrying the first set of Starlink satellites that can beam signals directly to smartphones from space.
I don't think this was intentionally deceptive. If the headline said "North Korea launches first rocket" it would be clear that it meant North Korea's first rocket, not the first rocket ever
I can see how this could be confusing though if you're not familiar with the existence of other satellite phones, and maybe a journalist should be held to high standards for clarity when writing headlines.
Who else allows you to use an unmodified (hardware or firmware) cell phone? Certainly not Iridium. You have to have a specific iPhone 14 that was updated to support Globalstar and using it is awkward. I can't use an old iPhone or my Samsung phone. Other players have had single test satellites that again required a modified phone.
That's the thing that wasn't clear to me. Do these work with any old 5G phone, or does it need special hardware? E.g. the satellite functionality in the latest iPhones is essentially "emergency only", and it requires a bit of a song and dance to make sure you have visible sky and a direct line of sight to the satellite. The article seems to imply this would be different, and would (eventually) feel just like expanded cell coverage. So curious how this would work.
Being able to call is still a major improvement for small handhelds. My current Iridium device (in reach 2) usually still takes minutes to send messages even under a clear sky (and does so out of order).
... as a tech demo, with a single satellite in orbit, and it was actually less than a year ago. They haven't yet launched any more satellites and neither has anyone else. A commercial service will require dozens up to thousands of satellites. SpaceX just multiplied the number of satellites capable of this in orbit by 7.
Why is everyone trying so hard to shit on this? It's going to be awesome when we have truly global commercial cellular coverage that works with unmodified existing phones. SpaceX is almost certainly going to be the first to get there, but I hope many competitors get there soon after.
If you've used old style satellite internet and then used starlink, you'll know that this is not the same technology. Starlink has latency and bandwidth that doesn't even compare to the companies and satellites you are mentioning.
This is a tech and nerd forum. Let us be excited about new technology.
AST's satellite wasn't "old style satellite internet". It was at an altitude of 513km. That's roughly the same altitude as SpaceX's satellites (~550km).
AST's satellite was absolutely "new technology", last September.
SpaceX was beat for the "first phone service satellites", even for low orbit 5G satellites with unmodified phones.
I wish everything wouldn't be referred to as just "5G".
Looks like they used 800MHz, so basically the longest range cell phone bands. Which is about as expected, none of that super-fragile millimeter wave stuff.
SpaceX is using 1900MHz, which will make a difference but probably not a huge difference.
I know. But 90% of articles call specific arbitrary subsets "5G" and it gets annoying to have the details skipped. By 5G does an article mean the incremental improvements, the expansion in mid-range frequencies, or the mmwave stuff? It's a crapshoot.
Let alone more subtle but important information like whether it's 5G in both directions.
> > This is a tech and nerd forum. Let us be excited about new technology.
It's the same old re-inventing the wheel with Musk cult of personality marketing slapped on top of it.
New thing of the 2020s is the mRNA vaccine which solved a big problem, people took it and then endlessly bitched about it while mirin and salivating at the Tesla cybertruck or the 300k Tesla Roadster which will never enter into production.
It doesn't pay to build stuff and innovate nowadays, it's more about conning people into thinking that some stuff will be built sometime in the future™ and it will be revolutionary, and then move the goalposts perpetually into the future™
Are you saying SpaceX isn't innovating? This has nothing to do with musk by the way, one can say that SpaceX is impressive and innovative while also disliking musk.
Innovation serves as a means to an end, like for example mRNA vaccines solved a big problem like COVID.
SpaceX doesn't solve any problem, 90% of the global population lives in urban areas, they connect to the internet using cell towers propagating 3/4/5G and good old fiber or fiber+copper
The remaining 10% is too poor so they cannot afford it, and they are also unskilled so if they want a shot a decent life they'd have to move to cities too where they can start as manual laborers and slowly climb the social ladder, they'd have to do it either independently or thanks to help from NGOs, UNICEF, UN, Doctors without borders etc. To put it bluntly fast internet is the last of their necessities.
SpaceX is textbook SV self dealing and wealth isolation where a bunch of assholes (led by the Chief Asshole of SV) who want to play with rockets and get paid for it , so they try to retroactively find a pitch to sell to VCs and asset managers to finance their play time and they do so by pitching them stuff like:
"Internet on your 10M sailboat" or
"Internet on your 2M Luxury RV"
And of course they get billions because VCs are also loaded and so they painted themselves so much in the corner with their wealth that the only thing that makes them enthusiastic is thin marginal improvement to trophy assets like a 10M sailboat or a 2M luxury RV, stuff that is totally uncorrelated with what regular consumers want or what the economy at large needs.
Holy hell. This take is so arrogant it’s incredible. Get out of your city bubble sometime.
I live in a rural area (the nearest town has a population of ~500) and use Starlink. I’m a photographer/software developer. My wife is a financial analyst. We have friends or family in the area that are teachers, engineers, nurses, small business owners, etc. Not everyone living outside of a large city is a freaking coal miner.
My wife works remotely and I need to upload large amounts of data for my job. Starlink has probably done more to help with housing prices in cities than every politician in the US combined as it allows people to work remotely anywhere.
You should get outside of your bubble! You are one of the few people who is in the 10% global population living outside cities who is educated, isn't poor or struggling financially. Data don't lie.
This only happens organically in the US and Northern Europe due to double condition of incredibly high GDP and a geographic morphology which is incredibly sparse and/or with lots of mountains and rugged terrain. 2 or 3 countries =! the world.
> > My wife works remotely
In light of this, you being able to negotiate a good compensation while working 100% remotely, in sectors that can be both defined by economists as advanced tertiary services then who has to get out of their bubble?
I am sure Sudanese villagers will be able to do just the same if you provide them with Starlkinks. Not!
> This only happens organically in the US and Northern Europe due to double condition of incredibly high GDP and a geographic morphology which is incredibly sparse and/or with lots of mountains and rugged terrain. 2 or 3 countries =! the world.
Canada too. Also Australia. Don't forget New Zealand. Friends in Mexico use it to work remotely. South Africa too. Also remember Argentina, Brazil and Chile.
The urban anti-car crowd seem to think all rural people are as bad if not worse than coal miners because rural lifestyles require cars. Their arrogance is through the roof.
That's a completely arbitrary definition though. If it's only innovation when it's useful, most inventions wouldn't be innovative when they were discovered or created. Going by your definition, mRNA vaccines weren't innovative until they were used in COVID vaccines, even though they have been worked on for years before.
Also, I don't want to debate the specifics of starlink or spacex, but starlink isn't really that much more expensive at all compared to average internet pricing here in Canada outside of the big 3 cities. Also, if SpaceX isn't useful for anyone, who is filling and buying all those launches (outside of starlink)? Are the satellite operators that use SpaceX also useless?
> > Going by your definition, mRNA vaccines weren't innovative until they were used in COVID vaccines, even though they have been worked on for years before.
Unfortunately cancer and viruses will always be with us. The secular trend of people moving to cities will not reverse, that's because of technical realities such as industrial and transportation economies of scale, critical mass of intellectual power and problem solving, logistics in food processing and distribution etc.
People live in cities for convenience and go to the wilderness for re-creation.
> > but starlink isn't really that much more expensive at all compared to average internet
Because it's subsidised by the military AKA tax dollars and VCs AKA future pension dollars of pensioneers and policyholders who are forced at gunpoint to part with some of their wages because government think they are too stupid to administrate their funds on their own.
Musk doesn't innovate per-se, he just dusts off old DARPA projects and convinced young engineers to work on them. Autonomous cars, reusable rockets, neuralink, Strategic Defense Initiative... Musks genius is making it seem like these are not long-studied military tech objectives but for humanity. The SDI stuff is very DoD centered-- Starlink as a business doesn't compute without military.
Taking something from a research prototype proof-of-concept to production absolutely counts as innovation. In some ways it's the most difficult and impactful phase of innovation.
Likewise there's an early DARPA project for basically any technology you care to name. That says a lot about US budgetary politics and not much about the tech itself. Spend a few hundred million on most research and development and it's a big-government boondoggle; make it a national security appropriation and no one in Congress will bat an eye.
Those young engineers have worked really hard and done some extremely impressive things. Perfectly possible to acknowledge that, whatever you think of the majority shareholder.
iPhone with Globalstar are not satellite phones. They are phones with satellite. They are only text messengers similar to the SPOT and Iridium ones. Starlink is starting with text but planning on doing voice and slow data.
There is a big jump from going from device that have to pay for and pay subscription to working with every iPhone for free. Nobody knows if partner providers will charge extra for service or not but it should be free.
iPhone with Globalstar is absolutely a satellite phone. They've added a satellite phone to the regular cell phone. That's different than what Starlink is doing which is broadcasting a regular cell phone signal.
Which "it" are you talking about? Apple added Globalstar antenna in iPhone 14 so it works with any newer iPhone. If you are talking about Starlink Direct-to-Cell, it will work with any phone with 5G and 1900 MHz band.
For Starlink Direct-to-cell, they are partnering with mobile providers, like T-Mobile in the US. I can't find it, but my understanding is that it will be included in the service. It will be incentive for people to use T-Mobile.
Based on some googling, the latest iphone is 15, so that means it works on 2/15ths of iphones, or an even smaller fraction if you count all the variants apple has released.
If we're looking at non-iphones, the fraction likely gets even worse. Remember 3g was only shut down a couple years ago. And this requires 5g to work? As in 2 entire generations newer?
But yeah, I also haven't found any confirmation it would be free for T-Mobile customers (who have the right phones), so I think it's safe to assume it won't be until we get that. It'd be cool if true, though!
Apple's thing is basically a satellite phone. It's a completely different modem and protocol from what's used to contact cell phone towers. They just added satellite phone functionality to a normal phone.
Once fully deployed, I wonder if this will have much impact on wilderness rescues? If you can get a text message out, you can send your GPS coordinates out too, and even if it's not perfectly accurate, it will get the rescuers to within range to hear/see you.
Or, to view it from the opposite end of humanity, you could send a text message with gps coordinates and a time, and a high altitude loitering drone will put a mortar round or simple smart bomb at that spot.
It might decrease the cost of going out into wilderness, which otherwise encourages prospects to purchase an emergency locator beacon or GPS/satcom device and associated service (e.g. Garmin In reach). Depends if this is cheaper.
The not-quite-the-same Apple emergency contact by satellite, plus older standalone systems like inReach, are already having a huge impact on wilderness rescue, for better and for worse. It's a net-good overall for humanity, of course, but some rescue organizations are worn thin by the lack of information provided with a call combined with a perception that the availability of rescue creates a less cautious attitude towards the wilderness.
Once fully deployed, you'll have the same connectivity in the remotest wilderness as you do from your living room. Apple already has the Emergency SOS [1] feature for sending texts from remote locations in emergencies. This SpaceX service will start with something similar and grow to indistinguishable phone service. Coverage might be a little slow so maybe your youtube playlist will have a bit of buffering while you wait for your rescuers.
Starlink Direct-to-cell will not have the bandwidth for "indistinguishable phone service" unless you are still using a 2G dumb phone. The bandwidth is 7 Mbps per cell and each cell cover thousands to millions of people. Which means that each phone will have 20-100 kbps, enough for voice and some data. But not enough to even load the Youtube page.
I've been exploring the most remote corners of the planet for over a decade now, and while I understand what you're saying, constant connectivity is not a problem if you don't want it to be.
I personally don't have a phone, and I prefer not to have "comms" when I go out. I want to be in the wilderness, not connected.
So what I do is carry a turned off sat communicator tucked away safely in my "go bag". If something ever goes badly wrong (worse than it has so far), it will save my life.
There's always the option to turn off your phone entirely, leave it at home, or simply buy a dumb phone incapable of using these new satellite features.
There's always going to be that one person blasting music in the wilderness, just because some people want to be disconnected doesn't mean we should eschew progress towards tech that can save peoples' lives.
Why would that require running your own cell network? The Verizons and T-Mobiles of the world would be happy to stick another cell phone in their roster. The only barrier is getting people to buy it.
Edit: Actually there are plenty of third party app stores for Android already - including several from popular phone manufacturers[1]. The main barrier is probably getting developers to put their software on these stores and getting consumers to buy from them.
Consider the Parler case study. There the app was removed from the app stores but also Amazon stopped servicing the application. You could imagine a scenario where if the app stores had decided to not remove the app, then the underlying carriers could've been leveraged to disable the application.
To truly escape the walled gardens of the cell phone world, it would seem you need to control the entire stack from carrier up to device and application.
Can anyone tell me if this is a realistic thing to worry about when thinking about state surveillance, i.e. van the US use this to track phones in other countries?
Edit: I know very little about 5G and satellite tech, but love to learn more
Awesome. My wireless bill is too high and competition never hurt. I would think satellites are way cheaper than setting up ground based towers and therefore will offer cheaper service.
Satellite-based internet and cell services aren't competing in the same space as your regular cell carrier. They aren't going to make your phone plan cheaper.
train : plane :: land line : cell phone :: terrestrial : satellite
The transition won't be instant and there will still be a place for terrestrial cell service for a long time, but the future favors flexibility and ubiquity.
The big challenge/opportunity will come when a non-US player arrives, like Thuraya after Iridium and the NSA can't slurp down all telephony.
Time doesn't really have anything to do with it. You are fighting the basic laws of physics. For example 4G/5G home internet has been around for many years. Has it made your Comcast bill any cheaper?
You think satellites are cheaper than ground towers?
Even if they were cheaper, a satellite is limited to 7Mbits/s. A 5G tower can handle 10Gbits/s. And you don't even have to price a cell tower by the kilogram.
> 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.
And to think he often overstates things.
A modern cell tower can handle a lot of throughput overall because it can slice a cell site into a lot of small sectors and handle a lot of clients in it. A single satellite covers many, many square miles even with a very, very narrow beam. Plus you're just dealing with vastly different SNR, power levels, speed differentials, etc.
Ah yes I see that. Will be curious if it stays as just a dead zone service. Interesting the wireless providers would sign on for this which could ultimately challenge them in the future.
The bandwidth is so slow for this direct-to-cell service that it won't replace mobile providers. The bandwidth for a whole cell is 20Mbps, except that is shared with the thousands of people in the cell. I have been thinking of it as 2G phone service. You get text, voice, and little bit of data.
It probably isn't physically possible to do phone with Starlink high speed service. The dedicated antenna would be better than existing 4G/5G but small size would be a problem. Also, the Starlink antennas depend on having good view of the size.
Finally, the market is tiny of people wandering in the wilderness who want high-speed data. Starlink competes with itself since its service can be used for remote camps; there are rumors of a smaller antenna. Starlink even makes it easier to setup wilderness cell towers and microcells at house.
There's a limitation to how much data can be carried by a certain radio wavelength. Adding more satellites within a given coverage area doesn't help, because they will just interfere with each other. Using antennas with narrower beams or beamforming and also launching more satellites could help, but there are limits, since you start to compromise on the ability for clients to connect.
I don't remember the exact figures, but the limit might be somewhere around 1 gb/s per 50 square miles or something. Contrast this with fiber fed cell towers. The fiber can carry unimaginable amounts of data, and data capacity keeps going up as endpoints are upgraded without laying new fiber. The tower's transmissions only cover a small area which can be a disadvantage but also has the advantage that it does not interfere with other nearby towers. Towers can be upgraded as well. For example, a tower might start with an omnidirectional antenna to cover the entire area. As more people start using it, it can transition to using a large number of sector antennas in a circle, each only covering a few degrees.
So, looking at it from the perspective of subscriber per square mile, satellites have a hard limit, and it's quite low, while terrestrial wireless has almost no limit.
This means that there is a certain subscriber density where satellite makes more sense, and a certain subscriber density where terrestrial makes more sense. The subscriber density where satellite makes more sense is probably far lower than you might expect.
Where is this info from? Hard for me to fathom this. Surely digging up ground to lay wires with lots of labor and materials is more expensive...at least I would think.
Per unit bandwidth, satellites are very expensive boxes of electronics, and need to be replaced more often. And we already have very extensive wire networks.
Satellites are cheaper per square mile, but they can only provide a sliver of service when they're covering such a large range.
If satellites were competitive anywhere with moderate density, a simple extra-big tower would be even more competitive. But we need more than that to split up users into smaller groups.
Really? How is it hard to fathom that building something on Earth is far more simple than sending a satellite up into space. Running wires isn't as expensive as a rocket generally. Also rural towers can use line of sight antennas to get backhaul from other towers that are connected to the wires.
A simple google search for cost to launch a satellite comes back with "between $10 and $400 million dollars". And cost to build a cell tower being "around $250,000."
If it costs $100k to run a mile of fiber, which would be very high, then you could run about 95 miles to a new tower before you even get to the low end of satellite costs.
Each satellite costs about half a million (on the low end) to manufacture and launch. They are projected to last about 5 years each. A 5g macrocell (The big ones on huge masts) cost about $150k and lasts about 20 years. The microcells cost about $10k including installation and work great in high density areas. So they last about 4x as long as a StarLink satellite reducing operating expenses even further.
This means, for the cost of a single satellite, you can run about 13 macrocells. In addition, the infrastructure for those cells can last much longer and maintenance is much cheaper.
The only place that satellites makes sense is in remote areas where people aren't clustered as closely. Satellite is great at covering vast swaths of land with fewer subscriptions. So an area that would require 13 or more macrocells or an absurd amount of fiber optics to service a couple hundred people is perfect for StarLink.
The equation will change a lot if or when Falcon Heavy starts operating though. Then we will be able to blot out the stars with relatively inexpensive satellites. But I foresee StarLink using ground cells in denser areas anyways to reduce space traffic since you can't just cluster the satellites over a specific area. Probably they will just rent out the nodes to existing providers to expand cell coverage.
> A 5g macrocell (The big ones on huge masts) cost about $150k and lasts about 20 years
So the days of my carrier forcing me to buy a new phone every few years are over? Sweet. About time they knocked it off with this constant infrastructure churn.
(FYI Falcon Heavy is operational, I think you mean Starship.)
Typically, they just replace the cells on the mast. I think $150k is for the fiber, pole, power, etc... The actual wireless gear is cheaper and can be replaced for upgrades. Although I'm pretty sure that 6g or whatever is just going to be 5g with a minor tweak so you have to buy a new phone. 5g is an excellent protocol and will easily last another 20 years.
Some one probably thought about that for a few minutes and ran some numbers and tests BEFORE they paid to lunch satellites in to space, don’t you think?
Nope. But I'm extremely interested in how that's possible. Remember, Elon starts with the question "does basic physics prevent this?" If the answer is yes he won't do it.
That explains most of his antics, basic physics doesn't prevent things like endorsing anti-semetic conspiracy theories or telling business partners to fuck themselves. One imagines he might benefit from asking more than that 1 question before doing something.
I'm kidding, of course. I don't think anyone actually believes elmu thinks about physics. He pays people to do that while he shitposts on the internet.
The really interesting question, given that it seems that ground to satellite communication using normal LTE modems is possible, is whether it's also possible to track the location of every cellphone in the country using the same technology.
Tracking cell phones is much easier than communicating with them. Don't need large constellation with big satellites to do that.
There was story on here recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38322966, about company that launched a constellation of small satellites. The US has lots of radio surveillance satellites that likely can track phones. Also, phone companies sell phone location data.
Line of site transmissions can go massively further than with even minor obstacles. While a different frequency amature radio operators easily contact the ISS on $30 5 watt handheld radios. If I recall Iridium phones are only a couple watts.
Sources:
- https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1742396904619581642
- https://twitter.com/TMFAssociates/status/1742430541574791566