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No, that would be utterly pointless. It's LTE from the sky: https://www.starlink.com/business/direct-to-cell https://www.starlink.com/business/direct-to-cell
by murderfs 2y ago
No, that would be utterly pointless. It's LTE from the sky: https://www.starlink.com/business/direct-to-cell https://www.starlink.com/business/direct-to-cell
- invalidopcode 2y agoNot pointless, that's the best use of Starlink with phones. Base station backhaul gets the benefits of not having to run fiber + space for a bigger antenna w/ better signal to noise ratio
- aaomidi 2y agoI don’t think availability of fiber is the bottleneck here.
- salviati 2y agoI think the problem with fiber in general is not availability, but deployment cost. You need to dig and bury the fiber. That's expensive.
- gsich 2y agoYou could mount it on poles.
- arghwhat 2y agoFor remote areas that might still be tens to hundreds of kilometers of poles and fiber just to add coverage to one remote area. Then you move on to the next. No one wants to do that across all of Alaska or the Australian outback.
- aaomidi 2y agoWe have cellular issues in upstate NY that has plenty of infrastructure. Dark fiber is also practically everywhere
- arghwhat 2y agoSure, but there's also cellular issues in the Australian outback and most of Alaska, and there you don't have infrastructure. You need power as well as fiber.
- ryao 2y agoThe deployment cost is even lower when you don’t need to put a tower on the ground, which is the point of this. They can cover the entire U.S. to eliminate coverage gaps using the starlink satellites.
- adastra22 2y agoIt is outside of cities.
- inglor_cz 2y agoIn the sense "you can buy fiber cheaply by the ton", not. But in the sense "laying down fiber in the mountains of Papua-New Guinea, or in the Canadian Arctic, or a simmering warzone full of militias", that is indeed a major bottleneck. So, location-dependent.
- lxgr 2y agoIt's absolutely the bottleneck in some remote areas, and satellite backhaul for terrestrial mobile networks has been a thing before Starlink, as far as I know.
- arghwhat 2y agoSNR is not a function of antenna size. The size is dictated by the wavelength, not how desperate you are to receive a signal. Directionality does make an antenna larger as it usually involves reflectors and directors, the size and placement of which is also a fraction of the wavelength, but if they are actually able to do direct to phone with decent reception and arbitrary coverage, then that beats having to set up base stations to cover a small circle even if you get 10-15 dB better SNR. This might give you LTE in, say, all of the Australian outback, all of Alaska, along the Andes mountain range, etc.
- kelseydh 2y agoIt's curious how this hooks up to existing telecom networks. I always thought of Starlink as eventually bankrupting them.
- esskay 2y agoPhone -> Starlink Sat for the initial connection. That then pings to a starlink groundstation, then it gets routed over their fiber to T-Mobile over the internet (its all just data going over fiber anyway). > fiber
- kelseydh 2y agoBut with starlink internet as far as I know they bypass traditional ISP's.
- esskay 2y agoWhy would that make a difference? You're not connecting to tmobile's network directly, you're connecting to starlinks, they're just routing traffic as part of their deal. It's effectively a glorified proxy service.
- mg 2y agoA phone has enough transmission power to communicate with a satellite? I would think the electromagnetic waves the phone sends are going out in a sphere, right? Then the loss on the way to the satellite must be gigantic.
- reaperducer 2y agoA phone has enough transmission power to communicate with a satellite? For the last 30 years. And the Starlink satellites are much closer to Earth than the satellites we used to hit back then.
- piltdownman 2y agoNot on LTE protocols. Not using a COTS 4G/5G Phone. Satellite phones aren't in the context of this discussion. You can just about get SMS emergency coverage with the latest generation of modems and aerials designed for the purpose. NTN standards are a long way off being set.
- lxgr 2y ago> NTN standards are a long way off being set. NTN phones have been available since the early 2010s, some even using geostationary satellites (which are 100 times farther away). If you mean 5G NTN, I believe the newer Pixel models already use that already, and I've been using it using a dedicated device since Summer 2023. They actually use at least some of the same satellites of the 2010s voice service, which I believe is no longer being offered.
- piltdownman 2y agoI'm talking specifically the ongoing 3GPP work from Rel-16 to Rel-19, and the proposed work by Qualcomm and Thales to validate the use-cases for formalisation of the standard. Rel-18, the initial release for 5G-Advanced, only brought in the support for the new frequency bands for NTN above 10 GHz - the Ka band where most of our interest lies for large-scale large-bandwidth provisionment - in June of last year for equipment manufacturers. https://www.lightreading.com/6g/5g-advanced-arrives-with-3gpp-s-release-18 https://www.lightreading.com/6g/5g-advanced-arrives-with-3gp... You're not wrong in saying that most of what we hope to be achieved with NTN is, to be fair, NTN-NR - or 5G NTN - as a lot of it depends on NR technologies like MIMO and beamforming in certain spectrums. Skylo did the first rollout of emergency SMS in Europe as per the 3GPP Release 17 specifications for Direct-to-Handset (D2H) connectivity in Q4 of last year. Note that Rel 17 designated only two usable frequency bands in Release 17 for 5G NTN use in the 5G FR1 range https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2024/11/26/deutsche-telekom-skylo-qualcomm-team-up-for-satellite-based-smartphone-connectivity/ https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2024/11/26/deutsche-telekom-...