Interesting! I dug into this a bit and it seems this has been brewing in the 5G standard for the past few years and was specifically included in Release 17. Qua

Interesting! I dug into this a bit and it seems this has been brewing in the 5G standard for the past few years and was specifically included in Release 17. Qualcomm seems to have been working closely with both Iridium and Globalstar. Iridium just finished launching it's Next constellation with 5G support to mobile phones one of the goals. Qualcomm had planned to include NTN (Non-Terrestrial-Networks) in the X65 5G modem with band n53 support. The frequency bands are in the s-band, putting it in the 1-2 GHz range. It's possible Qualcomm will be capable of connecting to multiple satellite providers. I see no mention of bandwidth, so it's probably terrible. This doesn't seem to be Apple's tech specifically, but they could have some interesting things to add to the service bundling and what applications would actually benefit from this connection. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I am expecting something on the order of text-only iMessages for a low monthly fee.