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My speculation: this ties into thier ultra wideband location technology: a killer feature would be the ability to LoJack and kill any device globally. As well as find anything with a UWB sticker attached. Not to mention you can provision phones and computers without carrier activation.

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My guess would be along similar lines a sort of always on, low bandwidth, side channel. So activation and a bootstrap for the next generation of weird protocols apple would love to cook up. I don’t know at all how airdrop works, but you could see it brokered through the apple network. Or like you mentioned a find my iPhone(and lock) that works globally without needing the phone to register to wifi/cell network. Or this p2p networking they’ve been talking about, that whole thing is a lot easier with a guaranteed signal to broker the nodes.

UWB has very short distance, inherent to the technology. it would be unrelated to this.

That is the case today because of regulation. I’m implying that phones and iPads and laptops etc. could be turned into UWB-locating relay stations which report nearby UWB beacons directly to Apple via satellite even if they are “offline”

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