Globalstar SEC filing, Apple to use 85% of its satellite network capacity
sec.report
sec.report
My only thinking is that they may be planning to make the satellite network available to none emergency messaging too, and that’s what’s covered in this filing.
Let friends know how remote you go.
If you’re on an adventure without cell service,
you can now use Find My to share your location
via satellite so friends and family know where you are.You don't really need to point it, at least with my inreach if its near the top of my pack and I'm not in a canyon or something I can get a message out.
Which is why when you're using it they guide you on how to orient the phone (per their released info so far, we'll have actual user reports in a few weeks).
That's 1.412538 watts versus 0.003162 watts... hence why you can just leave it in your pack.
Of course if you don’t trust that, you shouldn’t be buying an Apple product anyways. They could ship an always on microphone streaming to their servers if they wanted to. But we trust that they won’t.
s/freezer/bottom of a locked filing cabinet/What the hell is that all about?
If this has changed, scratch all of the above.
Because there are way too many spouses who go to as absurd lengths as setting private investigators on their partners. Stalking is just as much a concern inside families as it is for everyday persons - I might be tempted to say that the impact is worse given the potential for domestic violence. Or just imagine fundamentalist parents tracking their children to Planned Parenthood, a known LGBT-friendly place or whatever.
Ideally, there would be laws and regulations on trackers - and not just hardware-ones like the AirTags, but also software-based ones - that mandate features to prevent abuse, but sadly politicians haven't caught up on tech developments yet.
And all that to protect your love ones, of course.
People apparently forgot all about PRISM already. That didn't take long.
The contentious element is the "within the bounds of the law" bit. In the US and Europe that means a lot, because Apple can use the courts to block government overreach and they have done so. In China they can't do that, so they don't just as nobody else operating within China can.
Google does deserve credit for refusing to operate their search services within China, while Apple and many other companies decided they were willing to do business there on Chinese government terms.
If you have a viewpoint on the relative risks of these technologies, the I genuinely wish you'd use your time to talk productively about what you think the risks are to help others make an informed choice – instead of sarcastically assuming that anybody who doesn't have the exact same set of priorities as you is a fucking idiot. It's making the quality of discussion on this site totally unbearable.
We knew abestos was dangerous even before the WW2, and kept using it because it was so convenient.
That's the thing about know-it-all neo-ludditism pithy dismissals. They started 30 years ago witha much more soft tone. But since not only people ignored the warnings, but eventually even came to insult the people performing said warning (even after the warning proved to be true), the same people turned kinda sarcarstics.
Poor you to have to read a rational argument in a comment using history and logic to underline our societies shit where they eat and ignore the asymetry of risk.
Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions. They should always stay perfectly calm and neutral while they feel like half of the population is setting us up for troubles.
Your comment above didn't actually contain any such thing. It contained a vestigial semblance of them too trivialised by vitriol to land a persuasive point.
>Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions.
Not always for sure, but yes that's often the case.
Because 3 letters agencies never, ever had backdoors in popular systems. It's not like the US had an illegal massive secret cabale dedicated to mass spying on its own population after all.
Luckily, Apple plateforms are notoriously open so it will be easy to check. It's great that we don't have to take their word for it after they lied about not being part of any PRISM-like program.
Anyways, all that doesn't matter much. Why would it be a problem when the economy, climate, international politics and the democracy are so stable these days? I can't see any reason why history would repeat and powerful entities would abuse any power they get.
Somebody who thinks like that would be a crazy tin hat conspirationist, and not at all a concerned citizen.
No, only the part of the population ready to spend hundred of dollars on an upgrade to get copy/paste must be capable of rational thinking. Anybody else is biased.
There is also no source code or even audit by 3rd parties (that are not US government related)
And for your own privacy!
There is an optional feature where you can choose to share your current location using a satellite even if you don’t have coverage.
It would be stupid to use this capacity to track users because the data is not worth more than what you can get for free if you just cache the location and wait for the user to move into cellular coverage again. There is no conspiracy here.
So I doubt this will be used much as a stalker feature. Unless of course they hide a phone on your person/vehicle in such a way that it is both totally unnoticeable to you AND maintains a very clear view of the sky. Apple said that sending messages could take a minute or more with even light foliage, so hiding it in/under a car will be a total no-go.
You can't even realistically point the InReach Mini at a satellite because it doesn't tell you where they are. At any time there's only a couple of iridium sats in view and they move quite fast across the sky.
But the device has an antenna with the right amount of upwards gain and the right polarisation to deal with that. For an iphone it's a lot harder to incorporate that.
Couple that with phones that will roam into satellite coverage in rural areas... there will be extensive bandwidth requirements from this newly deployed fleet. Especially in the summer...
That's not what Apple announced. Satellite service is only for emergencies and is cumbersome to use.
Today was a real shot at two of Garmin’s profit centres with the Apple Watch Pro also targeting their GPS sports watches.
Moving forward, having both will be great, but I think having to rely only on an iPhone would make me a bit nervous, so I’m not sure how much of a threat this is for the inReach devices (at least for now).
I always carry my InReach with periodic location sharing enabled when I'm on backpacking trips. I also almost always carry it during international travel and road trips, but not usually with periodic location sharing. If iPhones start offering plans with periodic location sharing, I'm fairly confident that I'd stop carrying the InReach unless I was on a particularly remote trip that was outside of my comfort zone (which isn't something I really do anyway).
But I get what you’re saying, if you have 2 you have 1 and if you have 1 you have none. Some redundancy so nice and the iPhone as a backup to the inreach will be a likely set up.
I'm currently wearing a Garmin Fenix 7, which recently replaced a Forerunner 645. I look forward to seeing the Ultra reviews, but it doesn't strike me as competitive yet. E.g., the 36 hours of battery life is surely exciting for Apple Watch fans, but my Fenix 7 gets 18 days of battery life. Or if I turn Battery Saver on, I get 57 days of usage vs 2.5 days for the Apple Watch Ultra.
And what really makes the Garmin stuff suited for sports is years and years of carefully designed specialist features. I'm not even much of an athlete but I really appreciate so much of what they offer.
If the price were better I could see it being a threat for Garmin's low-end models. But at $800? Even if I were an Apple fan I'd struggle at paying more money for less watch.
So I ended up getting the regular model, figuring if I ever needed solar anything, I'd come back and get the right panel for the trip. Yet another reason I'm happy to support my local REI store.
It may have been my device (older Qualcomm branded phone), but my experience seems consistent with what others report.
On the contrary, I've been very happy with the Zoleo device and service. It's been 100% reliable in all conditions even in the middle of the bush.
Communication is one-way only and there is no way to verify delivery.
I agree that this will cut into InReach sales, because it provides about 70% of the capability and it's built into your phone. That said, the two way full text messaging and confirmation of delivery are huge advantages, especially if you actually plan to use it as opposed to it being a "just in case" communication device.
It's clearly two-way.
I am not a backpacker, so maybe I am missing something but if it is JUST for emergencies what do the Paid services offer than a NOAA Registered PLB Device would not?
As for other things worth paying for: being able to text your family back home and let them know you're running a day late but everything's ok so not to report you as missing goes a long way to helping everyone involved have some peace of mind.
Coordinating pickups and getting weather updates are also big value-adds.
If you need the other features then that makes a different argument but the original statement was that iPhone feature would kill these over devices because iPhone could be used to send emergency messages.
I'm surprised it's worth doing this, I'd have expected that most findmy situations it's enough to get the pile of data hours or days later when somebody has Internet access again. Like, suppose I drop my airpods out of a pocket on some mountain trail on Saturday morning, a subsequent walker's iPhone sees them, but has no WiFi of course, however on Monday they're in the office, their iPhone reports it saw my airpods, X here at T time, and that's enough that I should be able (if I want) to go back and find them.
The place you might spend longer periods with only satellite is the open ocean, but basically if you lose shit in the ocean it's fucking gone.
The use case isn’t AirPods lost in the tundra it’s your husband or wife lost in the tundra.
Apple has partnered with Globalstar to use geostationary satellites to send incredibly small amounts of data measured in bytes, not kilobytes. These satellites have only limited bandwidth, and it's very expensive. And with the antenna size and power available in a phone today, it's never going to be more than kilobytes.
SpaceX Starlink/TMobile announced a much higher-bandwidth option, but it's incredibly fleeting, lasting just a few seconds.
Starlink satellites are in very low Earth orbit, moving at 8km/second. You can't just point an antenna at it and have it work. The antenna needs to track the satellite. And it needs to have a constant line of sight free of obstructions. Starlink currently builds a very cheap phased-array antenna, but it's still ~$1,000 to manufacture, it's a couple cubic feet in volume, and it uses >100 watts.
Starlink V2 will bring very large antennas to Starlink satellites which will enable direct 5G connectivity, but that connectivity will last for a few seconds, with perhaps thirty minutes between connections.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but no one knows how to build a satellite system currently that will cause any carriers to shit their pants.
It sounded like temporary connectivity was only initially; once they have a full shell of V2 satellites I would expect constant connectivity.
I haven't read the announcement, but Globalstar's constellation is in LEO.
what most people think of as a satellite phone is indeed LEO since iridium has the lion's share of the market.
What they might be able to do is expand this to something like limited texting, or maybe down the line even non-realtime voice messaging.
If you use smaller antenna elements you must use a higher frequency, and higher frequencies are more attenuated by the earth's atmosphere (generally, when you get to THz there is a window or else visible light wouldn't be able to penetrate) so they have no chance of making it to a satellite.
If you use less elements you lose all your gain in the side lobes, as the other commenter mentioned
globalstar's existing network and licenses have nothing to do with geostationary at all.
please don't comment on things like this if you have fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of different types of mutually incompatible satellite network technology.
People already do this when communicating from the ground via amateur satellites on handheld radios. Here the fellow followed the sweep of the sky with his yagi.
(Disclaimer: casual observer at best. May be misrepresenting what I’ve heard.)
This makes me think it's less of an affordability issue, and more of where they fall along spectrum on amount of margin that can be squeezed from smaller suppliers.
https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-cove...
I'd also bet on Starlink to scale better than Globalstar (after they also own the fucking rockets). Add better features and innovate
Compared to Starlink's 2400 currently operational satellites that does seem low. Even compared to Iridium's 75 from the late 2010s, Globalstar's 24 seems small.
With the current satellites, yes, if they think they have enough capital (at least many hundreds of millions) to launch a new clean sheet of paper design LEO network using the existing globalstar L/S-band spectrum licenses, they could implement something better.
The value of globalstar is not in the existing satellites and earth stations, which are pretty much trash at this point for any modern use except very low data rate M2M data in certain geographically restricted areas. The value is in the existing LEO network operational licenses.
I wouldn't be surprised if the current Globalstar network is so limited it wouldn't even do voice.
Unlike Globalstar, the Iridium network uses polar orbits which means they're covering a larger area and thus need more satellites to achieve comparable service in the limited latitudes that Globalstar covers.
(that being said, if you're going to be in mountainous terrain, higher latitudes, far from land, etc then Iridium will have better coverage)
From Wikipedia:
>In 2007, Globalstar launched eight additional first-generation spare satellites into space to help compensate for the premature failure of their in-orbit satellites. Between 2010 and 2013, Globalstar launched 24 second-generation satellites in an effort to restore their system to full service.
So you're totally right.
A single cell tower with 5G/4G is not far off doing that, per sector. And these cell towers can cover as little as 500m or less in dense urban areas. The problem is there are very real physics you come up against with this. We are really tapping out efficiency gains these days so the only option is more, higher frequency spectrum and much denser cell networks.
Assuming you mean LTE when you say 4G, the per sector bandwidth is customarily an order of magnitude less than 20gbps. Even in the case of 5G, with sub-6Ghz anyway, you rarely will see above 15gbps. There’s only so many bits per second you can squeeze per megahertz and below 6Ghz the allocations there just isn’t enough available frequency. That’s why cell towers have gotten much closer together.
And towers are getting closer together. You reduce transmit/receive power and place the towers closer, which results in similar coverage but less interference between cells (with reduced power output).
When you mentioned 4G in the same statement. The highest I’ve ever seen for a LTE tower in the US (I’ve been in 49 states and checked via field test equipment in multiple areas of each state, yes, I’m that nerd) was under 5gbps. LTE sectors more commonly are in the 1-2gbps range. As to 5G, sub 6Ghz it’s possible to get close to 20gbps air rate, but you need an very wide channel to do so (have to do the math, but I think >100mhz of spectrum) and I’m not aware of any US carriers doing so (but they could be). If we are talking the rare unicorn mmWave, the one with less than 1% of all US cell towers supporting, sure, 20gbps is common. Twice that isn’t unheard of either.
Long story short, we are violently agreeing both before and now. It’s just nuances we are both dinging the other for. Cheers!
No, I’m really not, that’s why I put the caveat about maybe not today, but big rivers have a way of starting as a small trickle.
We already see this kind of thing already with T-Mobile + Starlink, Home internet providers bundling phone plans and allowing you to roam to other networks, traditional cellphone providers hopping on board Wi-Fi calling support, and Apple + Globalstar.
One of the incentives to participate may be free or reduced-cost satellite data.
I quite like the idea of aiming it by hand using software as the guide.
Apple's antenna can only be smaller if it's lower gain. I would bet they're making that tradeoff because they don't need as much bandwidth. (Emergency pings could be measured in dozens of bytes, let alone kilobytes or megabytes.)
> antennas with large effective apertures are considered high-gain antennas (or beam antennas), which have relatively small angular beam widths.
You CAN get high gain antennas for things like your WiFi router, it's my goto when an elderly relative complains about their wifi range.
You can't actually increase power with an (inactive) antenna but you CAN change it's radiation pattern. The higher gain omnidirectional antennas just take a radiation pattern that looks like a sphere (0dB gain) and squashes it into a donut shape. So you get more range laterally around the antenna at the expense of less above and below it
For emergencies, having to point at the sky isn't a big deal.
There’s been a lot of research into emergency UX. Basically, it needs to be dead simple or people die. In an emergency, people are usually panicked, injured or in shock. The tool needs to do its thing simply and effortlessly to cut through the panic and confusion of a real emergency. I have an avalanche transponder that is one big button because when you friend just got buried under 20 tons of snow and rocks, you have the leftover brain for one button.
From the demo, I think Apple is very aware of this which is why they give you a series of canned prompts. They’ve probably already used up a significant cognitive load by having you point the phone for signal that having you type as well was considered dangerous.
Your definition of the word “fine” is apparently rather generous. Be in an actual emergency situation and the InReach is down right frustrating as hell, but “better than nothing”. I don’t have optimism for Apple’s offering either for the record.
Tell that to a someone I know who had a broken leg and not only was the location way off, it took multiple hours to send. He was around a half mile of a well trodden hiking path too, so help took no time to get there once the message was actually broadcast (while the location was way off, he was visible from that wrong location). He wishes he’d had a loud whistle instead.
> I'll take InReach any day.
I’ll take my Inmarsat based phone any day. Sure, the monthly fee is 1.5x higher, but I know my message AND my call will go through as long as I have a clear view of the sky.
I've been using PLB for years and unless I'll only switch to Garmin InReach if I really need to communicate with people back home. Yes, it can be very handy, not just for that, but also to communicate with other fellow thruhikers in ways other than trail registers, but in some cases LEO might not be good enough for sending distress signal.
> I quite like the idea of aiming it by hand using software as the guide.
In the event of an emergency, fumbling with my phone to find service sounds like a nightmare.
Similarly, the best emergency-alert system is the one you have with you. Apple is playing the long game, getting their feet wet in a new area, and providing some value. They will iterate, it's what they do.
[1] For some definition of "no-one". Obviously some people do carry around SLR's but it's a tiny minority.
It doesn't have to be perfect, compared to the current alternative of 1) Having nothing to fumble around or 2) Be one of the few people with a full on expensive satellite phone I think it's a valuable addition.
Similar to how Chase Jarvis said "the best camera is the one you always have with you", this is also the case for emergency equipment.
They tried getting helicopter evacuation but even that took hours he didn’t have.
Also, difficult-to-use is better than zero connectivity, which is the current situation.
There is an argument that pay for rescue causes people to hesitate to call and that can lead to worse outcomes and/or more dangerous rescue scenarios.
Unfortunately GlobalStar is probably one of the worst satellite constellations out there (that I know of at least) for actual communication (SPOT devices used or still use GlobalStar and are famously crap compared to Garmin inReach on Iridium). Of course it could be improved and they do have the bandwith licenses which is important.
Do I have to be the angry parent with the shotgun or are Apple going to make an honest woman out of Globalstar and just buy them. There is probably enough down the back of the sofa at cuppertino to cover it.
While we are at it someone might want to check Apple employee stock portfolios ... that is a strong 80% straight line rally in a bear market the last few months after they announced their profit margins were -72% in June
This way they pay a relatively minute fee and can have a guarantee they can use Globalstar's existence to compete with others on with price. So they not only don't spend 3.71B they won't get back, the cost of those messages is relatively nothing and easy to compete on with others - for what is a commoditised service. They'd also force Globalstar to spend all that cash theyd get from Apple on their capex, at no risk to Apple.
Almost a similar reason to outsource to Foxconn vs buy them and have it in house.
I do disagree however, that global satellite coverage is a commoditised service just yet.
So the way to make an “honest woman” is to force somebody “to marry her at gunpoint” you say? The previous century called and would like their antiquated statements back. I’m sure you didn’t mean to be sexist, just pointing out the obvious about how bad that phrase is these days.
I will also say one is vaporware at this point and one is coming out next week.
But yeah, SpaceX's offering is going to be better if it works as advertised. Doesn't require buying a new phone. Doesn't require holding your phone pointing in a particular direction for minutes at a time. Can be used for any purpose, not just emergencies.
There's also ATS SpaceMobile which is similar to what SpaceX is doing but plans to use much bigger antennas on the satellites to offer higher bandwidth, enabling general data service rather than just SMS or voice. But they're a little farther out than SpaceX.
In practice not 3G speeds, but still much better than what this Apple / Globalstar service will be capable of.
My guess is their estimates are off and that satellite net speeds don’t correlate directly to regular network speeds because of all the other factors. If it’s actually 2-4Mbps… yikes, this would only be useful when you’re far away from populated areas (which in all reality could be their intended use case)
Except from the sounds of it the Apple service actually is something like 1bps, since they stated in the video it can take "only" 15 seconds to send one message. (assuming an emergency SOS message size of 15 bytes when compressed)
That's black magic.. software defined radio finally finds its niche.
Globalstar in the serious two way satellite business has been a joke for 15+ years, everyone who needs something serious that'll work anywhere on the planet has implemented solutions with Iridium, or something else geostationary based for low data rate (inmarsat isatphone, if not needed for very high latitude services). Or of course the wide array of different types of Inmarsat medium speed much more costly data terminals for briefcase-size folding (BGAN terminals, etc), ground vehicles, ships and aviation.
One of the Inmarsat 3rd party RF/modem partners is now making a data terminal for the medium sized UAV market which is about 3.5 pounds of stuff total including the antenna and good for 200-300 kbps of data, albeit at a typically high inmarsat $ per MB cost.
Or with small ku/ka-band self aiming vsat terminals in radome (commonly seen on ships), which get costly, which are quickly having their market eaten by starlink's much higher speeds and lower costs.
The value of globalstar at this point is probably in its spectrum licenses and legal entity's ability to operate, which given sufficiently deep pockets in capital resources, can be replaced with much newer and better tech in the L/S-band satellite-to-phone RF segment. I would bet good money that the people who are bankrolling this believe that they now have reliable access to two things:
a) relatively low $/kilogram cost for launches to LEO on some spacex competitor
b) low cost per unit mass production of satellites in an assembly line fashion, much as starlink satellites are currently churned out in large quantities.
Obviously they now know that what Motorola designed in 1997 for satellite-to-satellite data links in the same orbital plane for Iridium was the right way to go, I'd be shocked if a replacement Globalstar network did not implement a more modern version of the same. Same general idea as spacex's beta satellite-to-satellite laser links.
In the defense contractor/military/DoD world I have literally never seen a Globalstar terminal in use for anything anybody cares about. The only globalstar phones I've seen were in the hands of the staff of enthusiastic-but-utterly-telecom-clueless international aid NGOs, which not surprisingly completely failed to work in the location where they were trying to use them. They ended up packing them back into their boxes, putting them in a closet and buying Iridium handhelds.
Here's a CURRENT globalstar coverage map:
https://www.globalstar.com/Globalstar/media/Globalstar/Image...
The part in the filing that says this:
> Partner has agreed to make certain payments to the Company for (i) 95% of the approved capital expenditures Globalstar makes in connection with the new satellites described
I translate this as meaning that they intend to forklift upgrade the entire network to something that they think can reasonably compete with Iridium (and now SpaceX/Starlink) in addition to other regional players like Thuraya, and also of course Inmarsat.
If Apple really does acquire, I hope they ditch the bent pipe architecture, work on sat-to-sat connection, and most importantly for us, allow 2-way messaging on phones from sat, enough to send photos and stuff.
They have rules requiring the current Executive Chairman to retain majority control for 5 years. They have a right of first offer with him if he wants to sell stock.
With the company they have the right to submit a counteroffer to any sale of assets required to provide the services, or proposed sales of the company itself.
All of this makes me feel that they want to have this company as an independent supplier, but have buying it up as their backup plan.
From wikipedia.
Their customers seem to be pretty phone-call heavy industries, they aren't competitive on the data front, but aren't they cheaper than Iridium for phone calls?
I'm not sure what you mean by meo operators figuring them out because the only current noteworthy meo operator is o3b and their satellites are bent pipe architecture.
Oneweb satellites, which is presently an incomplete network, also do not implement satellite to satellite data links.
Nobody is going to invest in satellite phones or credits for a provider that couldn’t do space right.
An interesting alternative to sat comms is HF-DL if you don’t care for security. Cool to see all the Russia seized and reregistered jetliner equipment pinging and hearing HF-DL stations around the world on ACARS. Slow though, 300-1200bps.
Though I suspect there is more coming. Once the launch settles down, I wouldn't be surprised that with Apple's announcement of the service cost (beyond the initial free 2 years)... that something like 2 way messaging becomes available. To any iMessage compatible user, of course. As part of the paid feature set.
It wouldn't be automatic. If you watch the reveal today, they show how they avoided adding in a satellite antenna: it's communications to a satellite is weak and requires manually holding up the phone pointed at a specific direction (it appears the iPhone keeps an offline copy of ephemeris data so it knows where the satellites are located and can tell you exactly where to point).
The real secret that will be studied in business school for decades to come is Apple's supplier model.
“On September 7, 2022, Partner and Thermo entered into a lock-up and right of first offer agreement that generally (i) requires Thermo to offer any shares of Globalstar common stock to Partner before transferring them to any other Person other than affiliates of Thermo and (ii) prohibits Thermo from transferring shares of Globalstar common stock if such transfer would cause Thermo to hold less than 51.00% of the outstanding common stock of the Company for a period of 5 years from the Service Launch (as defined below). This agreement does not prohibit the Company from entering into a change of control transaction at any time.”
"Partner" is Apple
"the Company" is Globalstar
Thermo is a VC company
I had a previous employer who would get concerned when one customer accounted for 20%+ of revenue. You can sort of fix this by increasing revenue, but Globalstar sold 85% of capacity, for a resource that is expensive and difficult to increase. The upside is that many customers will want to be on the same service as Apple, so that might help grow their business.
Apple TV+ is also offered as 1 year free service when you buy a new phone, then you can also say the same about it, but - in fact - needless to say, Apple is committed to it.
The title is misleading. The filing doesn’t say Apple will “use” 85%.
The actual filing says
“Allocate 85% of its current and future network capacity to support the Services (see further discussion of capacity below)”
This could simply be that Apple is buying up the bulk of the capacity to box out competitors from offering same functionality.
Just like what they do with TSMC.
Apple doesn't mention any additional payment necessary for this feature. But clearly GlobalStar is being compensated heavily by Apple to allocate 85% of their capacity to them. So my question is, who flips the bill? Is Apple paying out of the goodness of their hearts (more realistically as a loss leader to sell more iPhones), or is Apple forcing the carriers like AT&T and Verizon to kick-back a portion of the monthly bill (maybe $1-$2 per user) to GlobalStar for coverage.
I suspect it is the latter, which is why we only see this feature available in select markets. Those are probably the markets where Apple has required all its iPhone carriers to agree to this payment.
Somehow GlobalStar gets paid and its not coming from the end-users (not directly at least).
Apple doesn’t do loss leaders.
What if a small percentage of Apple’s service revenue has been set aside for this very reason?
A quick check of the latest financial statements shows Apple’s service revenue through 3 quarters was about $60 billion.
I think you can pay for satellite bandwidth with that kind of money. ;-)
However, I'd expect them to roll it into Apple's aggregated services packages too at an economical price, an Apple One Premier + Satellite SOS, if you will.
SOS button is great, but it’s definitely tempered if that helicopter extraction costs you $30k
The Iridium network (which is what Garmin uses) covers nearly everything outside of the north and south poles. This includes all the oceans and basically all habitable land. That is why Iridium has dominated the satellite market for so many years over GlobalStar. Garmin satellite devices (like InReach) uses Iridium. But they also have non-trivial costs associated with that coverage.
As someone who has used these satellite communicators for years, don't get your hopes up on using these all the time like an extension of your phone. Sending messages over satellite is painfully slow, even with devices with advanced helix antennas (which the iPhone doesn't have). It can take minutes to send a single text message. Phone communicators sometimes have 20-30+ second lag in them.
I didn't realize Globalstar was that bad though. I knew it wasn't great due to the bent pipe network which precludes signals far out at sea etc. I've seen several hikers with Spot devices and they didn't seem unhappy with them. Mostly Americans though.
But yeah then I can imagine.
Nearly all Apple services are available only in the US and Canada to start; this is nothing new.
I’m sure Europe and Asia are next.
And it's not just for emergency either, also for find my.
9,600 bit/s packet switched Internet access (Direct Internet) 9,600 bit/s circuit switched data calls (Direct Dial-Up)
That's probably under ideal conditions.
Whatever is the cost of insurance for that type of service at Garmin and the dozens of competitors, I can assure you it did not come from the pocket of their CEO.
Even if you steal a phone and call for a rescue, whoever did the rescue will get paid regardless of your situation. The insurance company will sue your ass to the grounds, but that's a different discussion.
If millions of naughty teens ask to be "rescued", this is presumably costing Apple in satellite network fees.
An iPhone is -- and only when out of cellular coverage -- transmitting position or message packet of a few Kb (?) very infrequently via the satellite. Multiply by even a few thousands of iPhones per satellite (if that), how does this equal 85% of satellite capacity?
As far as I understand, Globalstar's downlink capacity is (or at least was) severely limited and also uses a different frequency band than their uplink.
That is a very important feature – knowing whether an SOS went through is extremely important in a life-or-death situation (for making the decision of whether to best stay put or try to climb to better signal etc).
PLBs are actually gaining that feature as well (by using Galileo as the forward path for the acknowledgement signal) for the same reason.
without this deal it would be inevitable for the company to get acquired and broken up for just the value of its operating and spectrum licenses.
Where's the announcement?