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Starlink launches "cellphone towers in space" for use with LTE phones
- rfarley04 3y agoAs someone who splits their time between Thailand and the US, I cannot wait for satellite phones to become commercially viable. Everyone in Thailand uses LINE for (data) messaging and calls. Everyone in the US uses (cell) SMS and calls. Having just a US number with satellite data would give me total coverage
- quailfarmer 3y agoUnfortunately because of spectrum rules it’s unlikely that cell plans will work outside of the regulatory coverage region.
- toomuchtodo 3y agohttps://www.airalo.com/ https://www.airalo.com/
- Nextgrid 3y agoBandwidth is very hit and miss on these. I've tried such a service very recently and in the evening in the middle of Barcelona it was unusable with very sporadic bits of high-latency (+100ms ping) connectivity. Frankly I should chargeback the payment out of principle to discourage selling broken products/services.
- marcosscriven 3y agoAgree on Airalo. I had better luck with Dent.
- paxys 3y agoThis use case is already being solved in the boring way. T-Mobile and Google Fi offer free global data roaming. All other carriers have been pressured to lower roaming prices on their networks in recent years. There is more and more free wifi coverage available everywhere (and phones now have auto connect capability). People are switching away from SMS to other apps. This is really not a problem that needs an expensive satellite connection to solve anymore.
- Difwif 3y agoUnfortunately for actual nomads Google Fi doesn't work. After 3 months outside the US they shut down your service.
- Scoundreller 3y agoJust pop your SIM card into a serial interface attached over the internet to a US-based phone’s SIM card slot every night (or one night a week?) Surely they won’t notice you teleporting around? Hopefully the phone doesn’t mind the latency when talking to its SIM that’s supposed to be 3cm away.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoAll the thungs you named do not exist in remote areas and where they do exist they disappear as soon as a natural disaster like an earthquake happens. being able to use SMS in a disaster area is a big deal.
- riversflow 3y ago> people are switching from sms Not my experience at all. I use SMS more now than I did a few years ago. The aggregate hardly matters when it comes to individual choices. > T-mobile and Google Fi > free wifi coverage. Ha! Where do you live? This doesn’t hold up to any place I’ve been that isn’t the flatlands. Cell coverage sucks any place with real terrain. I live in California within 25 minutes of a major metro, but in the hills. I only get one provider, Verizon, at my house, and only a few bars of LTE, no 5g. Any other provider gets no service at all. There is no place with free wifi within a 5 minute drive that I know of.
- Nextgrid 3y agoPretty sure free roaming is still very much a promotional offer and a loss leader, it's not meant to be used all the time: most carriers either limit the amount of time you can roam and/or implement separate data caps (often much lower than the main one).
- valine 3y agoThe bandwidth limitations mean it won’t be useful in populated areas. This is for when you’re out camping and there are five people on the network per square mile.
- gruez 3y agoYou already should have "total coverage" if you're using Wi-Fi calling, which contrary to its name also supports texting.
- anArbitraryOne 3y agoWhy not just get a US VoIP number like Google voice?
- iszomer 3y agoGV requires an active and linked landline or mobile number to be functionally useful and some major services will prevent you from registering a VoIP number (eg: banking).
- anArbitraryOne 3y agoFalse. It's nice of you to be overconfident, though
- iszomer 3y agoeg: LINE bars the use of GV numbers as does Discord. It used to be possible in GV's early years to make a call from your American GV number while in another country but seems to be no longer the case.
- anArbitraryOne 3y agoOr maybe I'm made a hasty generalization. I've used my GV number for years, including with line, and I still make calls from wherever with it, but maybe that's because of its age and that it was ported from a regular cell
- boznz 3y agoI'd upvote this just for Musk finally being honest about something, i.e. its low bandwidth restrictions. Still it's going to be a godsend like me who does a lot of hiking in remote areas to have SMS.
- gtvwill 3y agoIncoming monopoly. Already exists but it's now just gonna get worse. All your comms belong to starlink. On one side yay Telstra and Optus can go jump as they finally have some competition. On the other hand their competition outperforms them so heavily we are gonna end up under a monopoly exporting fat gdp out of the nation via starlink. We're probably worse off in the long run with the monopoly. I wonder if any one has contemplated how easy it would be to knock out a run of starlink sats and toss a region into comms blackout in future years as reliance grows? Probably could be don't with a semi trailer truckload of balloon drones.
- darepublic 3y agoEarth atmosphere terrorism right. Just create a bunch of whizzing space junk to take out all sats.
- callalex 3y agoIridium, Globalstar, and Inmarsat aren’t falling out of the sky because of this, and they don’t even fight over the same spectrum. Not to mention terrestrial cellular deployments still continue to get cheaper, now including self contained remote units with solar+battery becoming reasonably priced. As to the blowing up LEO stuff yea, at the minimum NATO and China have that capability. China caught a bunch of ire a few years back for demonstrating their capabilities.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bob1029 3y agoIf you look at it from an investor perspective, would you be willing to hold IRDM stock into 2025?
- Nextgrid 3y agoIt would be much easier to take out the current mobile carriers than a Starlink sat. The code that runs it is of terrible quality, maintained by incompetent companies with no incentive to deliver a quality service due to their oligopoly and the regulator being asleep at the wheel. The reason nobody is doing it now is because it's a one-shot weapon. You fire it once and your target will wake up and actually do better (rather, the government will force them to on national security grounds). However, non-disruptive attacks on mobile carriers are common. I'd wager any competent intelligence agency has a full view of worldwide SMS comms for example. Similarly, non-government bad actors also have insider access via malware or bribery.
- ortusdux 3y agoThey reciently released this image of these new V2 mini satellites. Quite the fascinating array! https://twitter.com/MarcusHouse/status/1738839709508571291 https://twitter.com/MarcusHouse/status/1738839709508571291
- panick21_ 3y agoThese things are so 'future' its crazy. Highly advanced phase array antennas. Multiple fucking space lasers. Advanced electric Argon thrusters. Its buzzword galore. That this thing is mass produced is pretty amazing, this isn't some research project.
- ortusdux 3y agoRecently, I was halfway through explaining Neumann Space's new thruster to an interested but non-scientific friend when I realized that I probably sounded like I was speaking Klingon. "So their approach is to ionize TZM, a molybdenum alloy, and then use the resulting plasma the same way as a traditional ion drive."
- panick21_ 3y agoHonestly when you talking about ion engines in any technical detail I also start to get lost very fast. People have some basic familiarity with normal rocket engine, its basically a car that caries its own ox. People understand fire and things going boom. These Ion engines just don't fit into any day-to-day mental models.
- ortusdux 3y agoLuckily, my friend remembered the old Sharper Image Ion fan infomercials wherein they actually did a pretty good job explaining the science. Those fans have an anode array that gives the air a positive charge, and then large cathode blades that attract the charged air. Because of fluid dynamics, the air accelerates past the blades and keeps on going out the back. Ion thrusters use the same general principle, but they need to carry their own source of ions into space. Most use tanks of compressed noble gas, but Neumann's new design turns solids into gas as part of the ionization process. This is great because noble gas containers are heavy for space applications, and the gasses themselves can be scarce and expensive.
- forty 3y agoSorry for the naïve question, but shouldn't "cellphone towers in space" require phones to emit more powerful signal to reach the satellite than they do for terrestrial towers?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> shouldn't "cellphone towers in space" require phones to emit more powerful signal to reach the satellite than they do for terrestrial towers? Ceteris paribus, yes. In practice, beam forming and the lack of vertical compared with horizontal obstacles reduce the distance. I'm not finding ready information for 5G terrestrial towers versus Starlink.
- kube-system 3y agoCellphones are UHF which follows a line-of-sight propagation pattern. It transmits much better through an empty sky than across the ground where there are obstacles. The Voyager spacecraft are billions of miles away and use 23 watt radios. The video streamed from the moon landing used a 20 watt radio to transmit a quarter-million miles. Starlink is just a couple hundred miles up.
- sbierwagen 3y ago>23 watt radio Transmitting from a 3.6 meter wide parabolic antenna, received by 70 meter wide parabolics, at a rate of 160 bits per second...
- kube-system 3y agoAnd about 30 million times the distance.
- lostmsu 3y agoWhich is just under 1 000 000 000 000 000 times more signal strength loss assuming quadratic dispersion.
- 3y ago
- paxys 3y agoI know it is inevitable, but I'm dreading the day when 100% of devices have fast broadband-level connectivity everywhere on the planet and there's truly nowhere you can go to just disconnect. Already in the last few years with satellite internet getting affordable you see people in remote RV camps or backcountry hikes or on boats in the middle of the ocean texting and video calling away, streaming the latest news and catching up on work emails. It's just going to keep getting worse.
- laweijfmvo 3y agoNothing worse than someone on a Facetime call on their way up Half Dome, I agree...
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Nothing worse than someone on a Facetime call on their way up Half Dome Is it so different from two hikers conversing?
- firstime111 3y agoYes
- joe5150 3y agoIn the most material terms, they're probably more distracted than two people who are both present and chatting which isn't great for anybody's experience. People also tend to be shouting into the phone, worse if they're not using headphones so you get to hear the other person shouting back. At a psychic level it also kind of sucks in ways that are harder to describe.
- puchatek 3y agoYes. People focused on their phones are even more oblivious to their surroundings than two people having a conversation.
- 3y ago
- nunez 3y agoThis will be amazing for in-flight internet.
- 6nf 3y agoMight require a window seat though.
- nunez 3y agoUnlikely. Planes with GoGo's (Intelsat's) gear connect to specially-equipped cell towers with antennas mounted to the fuselage. (As far as I understand it, these are regular cellular antennas that point up instead of to the side.) Since these sat towers will present themselves as terrestrial LTE-capable towers, theoretically, this equipment should be able to use them as-is. (Software might need to be updated though.)
- kortilla 3y agoStarlink already has in flight internet: https://veritastechpilotacademy.org/2023/12/20/starlink-signs-major-airlines-for-in-flight-connectivity-in-2023/ https://veritastechpilotacademy.org/2023/12/20/starlink-sign...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- andix 3y agoAs always with Elon: Sounds great, I will believe it when I see it. Or if some reliable journalist/YouTuber confirms it.
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- innagadadavida 3y agoI’m just curious how this will work in restrictive places like North Korea or China? Can the government jam the signals or will users be able to bypass local firewalls to access all the internet?
- digitcatphd 3y agoThis is cool but I’m not clear on why this is needed, is spotty reception really that big of an issue? Or is it really to save lives under extreme circumstances in ultra remote areas? Anecdotally I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have a decent signal
- cprayingmantis 3y agoYou'd be surprised! I'm a politician in a rural county in the USA and Cell Phone coverage is one thing that people complain about the most. Probably only 30-40% of the county has good signal strength. I'm really excited about this because has the potential to make things so much safer for folks around here.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoWell this will be fun. We already live in a world where law enforcement can easily spoof cell towers and ensnare anyone whose phone trusts said tower nearby, on a geographical basis. We are approaching a brave new world where any rogue nation's satellites could be overhead to provide cell service to anyone. There is a certain area of town where I frequently go, and there is a conspicuously disguised cell tower across the street, and I've suddenly become suspicious of it. As you roam around the countryside, do you trust the cell tower that's providing service to you? What happens when a rogue tower begins to lie about the time of day, or begins to harvest your data traffic for later decryption, or simply analyzes your SMS traffic on behalf of organized crime threat actors? It seems high time we need strong authentication mechanisms between handsets and towers, but on the consumer level, this is not a realistic goal. Have fun out there.