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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.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213426


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.


> Once fully deployed, you'll have the same connectivity in the remotest wilderness as you do from your living room.

What a dismal prospect that would be. Why bother going at all? Might as well plug ourselves into those bio-pods from the Matrix and be done with it.


> Why bother going at all?

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.

Totally worth it.


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.


> turn off your phone entirely, leave it at home, or simply buy a dumb phone

It's not the same; that's just play-acting, and one will not be able to pretend one doesn't know that.




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