Small antenna, text only, etc. Seems like Apple could disrupt here, but I don’t know a ton on antenna design.
Now imagine doing the same experiment where the dot is 540km away -- 5000 times farther. That's the altitude of a Starlink satellite. You might get lucky and sweep across the satellite once in a while but most of the time the beam will be many kilometers away from it.
It's not quite this bad; the beam will be fairly wide at 540km which makes the problem a little bit easier, but it's still basically impossible to hold the beam on the satellite for more than a few milliseconds.
And even that wouldn't work because you can't collect a strong enough signal from a satellite with an antenna the size of a cell phone. You need a parabolic dish or phased array about the size of a pizza box (minimum) to boost the gain enough. Satellites don't transmit with a lot of power, so your antenna needs a large area.
Good news: You don't have to do it this way. If you limit yourself to short text messages you don't have to aim the beam or use a lot of gain. That's how Iridium works.
But if you need a fatter pipe: Carry an antenna the size of a pizza box with you. Set it on the ground, let it acquire the satellite, then talk to it with your phone over wifi or bluetooth. Because this antenna uses closed loop feedback it can point very accurately at the satellite and stay locked on. This is basically how the Starlink antenna works, except Starlink would prefer that you not move the antenna from place to place (yet). And you'll need a big battery to power the antenna. It needs about 100 watts for transmitting; probably quite a bit less for receiving.
> Your aim has to be much better than the human musculoskeletal system is capable of.
> You need a parabolic dish or phased array about the size of a pizza box (minimum) to boost the gain enough.
No – there even is a very specific counterexample: https://satpaq.com/
I doubt that Apple would use that approach, though. If anything, I'd imagine that they'd use existing (for 802.11 and LTE) beamforming capabilities.
The only reason some pointing is required for Satpaq is that it uses GEO satellites which are a lot farther away than LEO, so concentrating most of the phone's energy into a cone a few thousand miles wide when it hits the satellite is necessary even for short messages. You need to do much, much better than this for high bandwidth applications.
GEO sats are also not a moving target; LEO sats are. That makes GEO slightly easier to point at, assuming you have a very wide beam which Satpaq does because it cannot possibly have a narrow one.
Again, high bandwidth satellite applications cannot work with such sloppy pointing mechanisms, and that limitation exists because of physics and information theory. It's not because "we just don't have good enough technology yet."
Beamforming techniques phones use to hit cell towers are not nearly good enough for satellites because satellites are so much farther away than cell towers. That means a satellite's transmitted energy is spread over a much wider area than a cell tower's is, and the ultra low power at which a phone transmits doesn't get a chance to spread out much before it hits the tower. You need a physically larger antenna when the thing you're pointing at is thousands of times farther away and you need to transmit with a lot more power. (Again, assuming you want the typical Youtube-style bandwidth cell phone users expect.)
As someone who owns a pretty big smartphone (iPhone 12 Pro Max) and both a current gen Iridium and Inmarsat phone (aka not a handheld two way pager, like the Garmin devices), I can assure you they aren’t similar in size in the slightest, even with the antenna stowed.
I can see people paying an extreme rate of say 10$/minute with serious warnings in a true emergency. But worldwide it might only be 100 phones at a time even with 10’s of millions of iPhones. Meanwhile averaging 100 calls * 10$/ minute is 1/2 billion dollars a year which could pay for bandwidth on LEO satellites.
Those numbers are of course pulled from thin air, but iridium suffers because few are going to keep such expensive service on a just in case basis. However, the technology and economics are really close to working out.
Yes, but you used the comparison to Starlink receivers. Per-phone is all that matters to refute your receiver size concern.
The reporting suggests that Apple partnered with Globalstar for delivery. I don't think anyone is under any illusions that Apple suddenly launched a LEO fleet but there's a lot of providers of satellite mobile telephony in the space and Globalstar is one of them. Low bandwidth satellite does not take huge hardware anymore.
You can buy Iridium or Globalstar mobile hotspots that are handheld in size (e.g., Iridium Go!). Many trail runners carry Garmin InReach which is phone-sized.
However, it's very un-apple-like to do something like that.