Apple and Globalstar Rumored to Announce Satellite Connectivity for iPhone 14
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
OneWeb were due to finish their constellation this summer, but have had to redirect launches from Russia to SpaceX delaying the completion of it. I wander if that impacted the Apple deal, with Apple wanting to launch the product this year.
OneWeb were launching incredibly quickly last year, achieving one launch of 34-36 satellites per month. It’s unfortunate that it came to a halt in February due to Ukraine. They are currently on 428 of 648 for the complete constellation, I believe just below what’s needed for initial operation.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneWeb_satellite_constellati...
Even just writing that paragraph, so many autocorrect opportunities were missed, and so many were suboptimal or just plain wrong…
Blows my mind that Apple isn’t doing better at this feature at this ooont. No, I meant to type “point”!
Seems like there's low hanging fruit in AI applications that are still not even close to optimal.
But it really ducking sucks…
It's possible he jumped the gun in 2019 and it's finally coming to fruition. It is cool, and Starlink shows it's possible, but it may also just be wishcasting.
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/12/20/apple-secret-team-satel...
I wouldn’t say it shows it’s possible yet. They claim it’s possible but there are none of the starlink v2 satellites in orbit that are required for it to work. Originally v2 satellites required Starship for launching, it sounds like they are pivoting to Flacon now though due to delays in Starship reaching orbit.
Apple will want the service to be available as soon as the Phone launches, so potentially in late September. It’s going to be at least late 2023 before the SpaceX/T-Mobile service lunches.
Getting the v2 satellites up is an unmet milestone, not proof that it won't work.
Clouds, rain, atmospheric density variations, interfering signals and noise sources, phone positioning, the attenuation and reflections from nearby materials...
Also, don't forget that the SpaceX announcement was for a max of about 4 Mbps for an entire cell which they said was a very large geographic area. It will also be asynchronous short message (text) for quite a while. Next time I am backpacking in Canyonlands it will be great to have, but it will have very little impact on the vast majority of phone usage for quite some time. Its a small but important step.
That is the intent of Starlink. Some amount of connectivity everywhere. For all the corners of the world that no traditional carrier will cover.
With a complex, large, high gain antenna.
Satellite phones you can buy right now don’t look like iPhones, for a reason.
Both support handheld, battery-powered client devices (some even smaller than smartphones), and the former has been using inter-satellite links since day one.
Edit: Globalstar modem data sheet: https://www.globalstar.com/Globalstar/media/Globalstar/Downl...
There were periods of time that the Globalstar network was literally requiring you to use a "call times tool" to determine the paltry 10 to 20 minute windows at a time every hour you could even get a call out on the system. They were so desperate to keep customers that you could get a satphone for a whole $40 a month - with unlimited! calling.
They then, finally, a few years back, launched their Sat-Fi2 service. Instead of using bent-pipe CDMA, they decided to use bent-pipe UMTS. As a Sat-Fi2 customer I can assure you I never got a working voice call, and barely working data. Globalstar was so impressed with their own technology they killed off this "next generation" service.
Now to this day, they stopped selling satellite phones (while still allowing activation), dropped every single reference to the Sat-Fi and Sat-Fi2, and are pushing hard on their simplex burst data services.
>TAMPA, Fla. — Globalstar has signed a term sheet with a “large, global customer” to start deploying some of its spectrum for terrestrial use “in the U.S. and beyond,” the satellite operator said May 5.
The operator said Feb. 24 it picked MDA and Rocket Lab to supply a set of 17 satellites to replenish its constellation after a “potential customer” agreed to fund most of the $327 million project. The agreement includes an option for up to nine additional satellites at $11.4 million each.
https://spacenews.com/globalstar-agrees-terms-with-global-cu...
A secret customer fronting large amounts of money to enable goods or services they want to offer is certainly in keeping with how Apple operates.
The satellites aren't capable of a small amount of buffering? For text messages it shouldn't take up much space, and a lag on the delivery is better than no delivery at all.
The original phone they offered (the GSP-1600) was a modification of a Qualcomm QCP-860 that they just slapped the Globalstar stuff on top of. The only difference here is that Globalstar's CDMA authentication was done on a SIM card inside the phone (which is a supported CDMA feature, R-UIM).
(9/11 was the worst terrorist disaster in the US, but until the towers started falling only the two towers and a few buildings that caught fire were directly impacted. If you were in, say, Brooklyn, you could see it happening but you were in the safe zone.)
If you think about it, these satellites are only 1-2 orders of magnitude farther away than a typical cell base station.
By scaling the data rate down by the same proportion, you can span that distance using roughly the same transmission power and antenna technology.
But the biggest surprise was the size: the device was tiny, I was easily able to hold it in my hand. The antenna extended a little but still under the size of my iPhone. Needed LOS to the sky though. Battery lasted for days. Software was atrociously bad: lots of errors and problems.
So after my trip I was 100% convinced that we will soon see this kind of connectivity built into smartphones. It's great to still be able to contact the world even when truly remote and of course phone manufacturers would love to sell us another subscription.
There are also some settable canned messages and an emergency signal options, but I never used them.
Do you hike, sail or otherwise travel in truly remote areas? That was my scenario - being able to tell my wife and kids that I am OK while days away from the closest outpost of civilization.
It's very conceivable that with an L-band or similar patch antenna some kind of low speed connectivity can be accomplished with line of sight to the sky via a mobile device. There are already devices sold for hikers etc that operate like this (simple SOS text messaging etc) and sat tracking of vehicles and trucks. A lot of it is store and forward type stuff.
As for full voice and high speed data - yeah, that ain't happening yet at the consumer level mobile device.
Yep, I’ve owned a ton of them over the years. My first was the FollowMeSpot device coming up on two decades ago. They’ve of course gotten a lot smaller, but are still definitely “thick fugly bricks” in comparison to Apple’s designs. Looking at tear downs of them, I see absolutely no way you’ll fit the important bits of one inside an iPhone case.
5G phones support frequencies in these bands, and well above and below either.
The early PCS allocations and a few later allocations (1900, 1800, 1700) are also L-band, but there’s good reason not to use them for this, they are already heavily in use all over. Satellite cells cover a large area and you don’t want to collide with a tower using the same frequency.
The 600-800mhz allocations are not great for satellite broadcast due to limiting characteristics of those bands.
So for the 5G bands that would not already heavily be in use and/or aren’t well suited to satellite use, that leaves us C band (3-5ghz), and K/Ku band (mmWave).
Also, marine (ships, platforms etc)
No, I’m just a tech geek who had to be emergency airlifted from 11,000ft off a mountain straight to an emergency room. I happened to have an Iridium phone at the time and it’s what likely saved my life (no cell phones worked there). Since then, I’ve been interested in something better and so have done a bunch of research trying brands over the years and have settled in on a few devices I find best for my needs.
Could you share some of your recommendations or what your research has uncovered?
To me, the bizarrely premature T-Mobile/SpaceX pre-announcement ("beta in select areas by the end of 2023") makes a lot more sense if they felt they needed to beat Apple's announcement.
But I'm still mystified by this for two reasons:
(1) Apple doesn't/can't do niche. So either all customers will get this benefit for free, or it'll be another checklist feature of iCloud+ and/or Apple One.
(2) Presumably, there are non-trivial, hardware-related costs to doing this. I find it hard to believe that Apple's going to enable this esoteric capability on every device.
What am I missing?
The difference in data rate and SNR required for voice and text messaging is enormous – if you can afford for your message to take a couple of seconds to go out, you can be fine without an antenna.
I currently own a couple and have owned a bunch of other devices in this category. Have you ever looked at a tear down of one of those devices? Now compare that to a tear down of an iphone? Even supposing Apple can design a much smaller antenna, where is it going to fit? What’s the battery life going to be when it has to send messages periodically (until confirmed) at MUCH higher output power?
Here's a list: https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=Dq3CEPZjfRAhtToGD4Yrz9
At an organizational rather than a country level you already have a situation where everyone has a camera in their pocket. At a lot of companies, it used to be a big deal to bring a camera into a building involving security passes etc.
To be sure, if your use case is a car breakdown at night on a country road with no cell service, you're probably better off with just using your phone.
I used to hear on the news about people getting lost all the time on the trails around Phoenix, in flip flops and without water, having to spend the night outside before they could find them. Often enough they would have warnings on the radio and TV about it.
Hell, one of the big forest fires a couple years ago was started by a lost hiker trying to signal for help.
A large search is very personnel and time intensive.
Depending on the situation though, even a relatively simple rescue can take a dozen or more people and many hours.
Reminds me of the time we were in Jungle School down in Panama. The first day was the land navigation course and a squad from headquarters had their one (and only) compass break. They ended up walking around the jungle for over a week before they found a road and flagged down a passing vehicle. If they had a way to communicate (or could read a frickin’ map) they’d have been back by chow time but, nope, the senior officers were like “they’ll turn up eventually” and didn’t even try to find them.
And failures notwithstanding, a compass and map are a pretty high reliability way not to get totally turned around/lost especially in less challenging terrain.
In this regard, broader access to communication outside of cell phone coverage is a huge benefit.
Now, this isn't discussing whether people are more likely to push themselves further or do things they're not capable of or adventure alone or go out insufficiently prepared if they feel they can just push a button and get rescued if anything happens. that broader question is an important one but for the individual person being able to communicate can absolutely make a difference in whether you survive or not.
[1] In fact, I'd argue that while over-reliance on electronics generally is a poor practice, a cell phone (along with external battery pack) should probably be considered essential safety equipment in most circumstances.
And they've probably been using it as a GPS all day which can come pretty close to draining the battery all by itself.
Modern smartphones are pretty wonderful but it's easy to put all your eggs in that one basket and have no realistic fallback.
There are PLENTY of areas people go under normal circumstances that don't have sufficient service if there's an emergency.
There are use cases although I wonder how many of the people who wouldn't buy a separate device would pay for a hypothetical satellite subscription. But I'm sure some would.
With remote working, if it were possible through satellite, digital native people would populate the unoccupied land (and oceans). The definition of “remote areas” is that you don’t know how populated they would be if network were available.
It is possible with Starlink where available. You could never have worked from my brother's house with either a hot spot or 1Mbps DSL. With Starlink, while not 100% reliable, it's quite doable.
However, I'm making the assumption that for the foreseeable future a sat option for phones would look more like the text messaging of the Garmin devices.
Presumably it's also OK if a warship that shows up at a military dock frotzes mobile phones -- maybe even if mobile phones were disabled on bases in general? I've never been in a military and haven't the faintest idea how much is confidential. And it's not like the military doesn't have other telecom gear.
If a warship ties up at a civilian dock it's a little more tricky, but in general I'd think this principle would also apply.
Aircraft carriers now have Wifi available for sailors for morale reasons, so cell phones are used all the time while underway for text and email.
However, if an incident happens (such as a crash) or, you know, going to war or etc - the ship will undergo "River City" conditions and I guarantee you everyone on board knows the drill and you'll be in deep shit if you violate River City. River City conditions will also be implemented in the case of a fatality, accident or death onboard the ship so the identity of the victims is preserved so the Navy can make next of kin notifications without family being alerted early to the issue.
If so, maybe it’ll work at launch of the iPhone 14 and even though they didn’t beat SpaceX/T-mobile to the announcement, they’ll implement first; I don’t see Starship / Starlink 2 flying anytime in the next 10 days…