As someone who owns most of the common satellite phones and data devices available today and sees the antennas on each, I’m sorry, still calling bullshit on this, just like every previous year this rumor came out.
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?
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?
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?
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).