You could imagine a situation where they can do that. But practically what happens is the phone connects to a sat, the sat connects to a local ground station,

You could imagine a situation where they can do that. But practically what happens is the phone connects to a sat, the sat connects to a local ground station, then across conventional fiber to another ground station, up to a sat and then down to the other phones. The are likely doing that because regulation and so on. But the do what you suggest.