SpaceX is getting ready to test its Starlink satellite-to-cell phone service | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX is getting ready to test its Starlink satellite-to-cell phone service

engadget.com

84 pointsFinnKuhn59 comments

Just to confirm: this will / does require the phone to be capable of transmitting a stronger signal, therefore needing a hardware upgrade?

After some googling: yes, there are / will be external comm devices and some future chipsets will support this functionality. Qualcomm, Motorola, and Iphone. Initially for messaging only, but still a gamechanger in many ways.

The article seems to imply direct satellite to UE connections but doesn’t make any mention of what wireless protocol that would be through and what types of phones would have modems for whatever that technology is. Is there a more complete source out there?

It uses LTE and any phone should work.

The new versions of their Starlink satellites with bigger and more advanced antennas will just pretend to be cell towers. Similar to a cruise ship or many aircraft (mostly outside North America).

So does this only work with their V2 mini satelites?

Correct. And it will also work with the future V2 satellites (non-mini), which require Starship for launch.

It's referring to this partnership between T-Mobile and Starlink: https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-cove...

Oh good maybe I'll finally get signal with T-Mobile

Right after your phone number is SIM swapped away

Fortunately its a work phone. That'll be IT's problem, not mine!

Perhaps I've been lucky, but in over 15 years with T-Mobile I haven't had any real problems to speak of.

Tmobile just bought another carrier...

This is technology to track the poor.

Very excited for this. I live about 5 miles outside of cell range.

It isn't going to get you phone service. The satellite service is low bandwidth, I heard 9 Mbps shared with the entire cell. It will be limited to messaging and maybe voice call.

It will replace satellite messengers and satellite phones.

> It will replace satellite messengers and satellite phones.

Sure, at first. That's certainly not the end goal. VoIP works well enough for now that I'm still able to work and communicate just fine.

This service is pretty extraordinary and pushing physical limits. It requires new satellites with large antennas. It is unlikely that we'll see faster internet with existing phones.

It might be possible to have mobile internet terminals, like a satellite hotspot. I hope Starlink comes out with something like that.

The upcoming Starlink mini terminal is pretty small but its power consumption will probably still be pretty high.

I was hoping they would announce something like that. I bet it kills off the similarly sized BGAN service from other satellite providers.

I'm involved with disaster response and the size and power requirements of current antenna are problems. Something smaller, slower, and easy to power with battery and solar would be very useful.

Also, new antenna might work well for remote sites. Stick it on pole, power with some solar panels and batteries.

If its a low population zone then 9Mbps seems reasonable to do phone calls and chat.

Yes, especially since not every phone user will place calls all at the same time. Erlang’s loss formula will give you an estimate of how many calls you will give busy signals to, given some number of customers and some measure of how many calls you can carry at once.

Turns out it is 2-4 Mbps. We don’t know the coverage area, if satellite footprint or spots like regular Starlink. Voice is doable, if crappy, in 9.6kbps.

I find interesting that it will be like 1G cell phone.

I live a few miles from nowhere, and the last few years have been a revolution. My internet is now provided by Starlink, and I have a microcell for which the backhaul is Starlink.

What sucks is that in ten years, you will be begging to be outside cell range... but you will never ever be able to live outside surveillance range ever again.

In most countrys are cellphone licences very expensive, so hm ..

And all bands are already in use by terrestrial services. Or reserved for something else.

All bands aren't in use in the middle of nowhere. There's plenty of spectrum available.

I think there is not much spectrum left.

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/ja...

I'm not sure how I can be clearer about this. Satellites can provide phone service using spectrum that is already allocated.

Yes, but in most countrys, this frequencys had been sold for a lot of money. So I think, SpaceX can't just use this frequencys.

They can sublicense from the existing spectrum holder as I said.

There is a great deal of difference between what is assigned and what is actually in use at a particular location. Cell phone networks in different regions have different build histories and thus use different frequency bands even when they are currently owned by the same provider. Your preferred provider might “own” 12 frequency bands, but may only be using 4 of them in your city and a different 4 in a city an hour away. The only advantage to buying a phone from a cell phone provider is that they will already have figured out which phones will actually work in your city, with the network as it has actually been built. If you buy one independently you need to do that work yourself. A satellite provider could provide you with service as you drive down the highway through areas where the cell towers only support the “wrong” frequency bands.

Furthermore, the cell towers have very limited range; usually just a few miles. Past the edges of the urban and suburban areas there will be nobody at all using those frequency bands except for a few lonely phones repeatedly asking for service and getting no reply. A satellite provider could easily provide regular phone service to thousands of users across a huge, sparsely–populated area where cell phone towers are few and far between.

SpaceX is sublicensing spectrum from existing carriers such as T-Mobile in the US.

The statement they made when announcing this was that for the US they're working with T-Mobile, and that they would work with any other company around the world that wants to have the service on their spectrum.

They’ll have to license the spectrum in each country they want to operate in. This could be interesting I assume that their spot sizes are narrow enough however they might land in some legal issues in border areas…

I have a small Garmin satellite messenger right now that is smaller than my phone - always seemed like those antennaes and chips could be eventually integrated.

Those are integrated into the iPhone 14. The throughput is so low that it's only for emergencies.

Significantly different use cases. Battery life, physical durability, etc are all significantly better than a phone.

Iridium constellation orbits at 780km, while Starlink is slightly lower at 550km. Don't know how much, if any, difference that makes in the signal strength requirements. As I understand it, Iridium was designed with the tradeoff of accepting weaker signals with lower throughput, while Starlink wants high throughput and needs a stronger signal.

A few years behind[1], but they do have the infrastructure to make it happen!

[1] https://lynk.world/how-we-do-it/

How will VPN services fare on Starlink with GPS?

Will mobile VPNs be able to block their GEO locations?

I think this is why he bought Twitter (although I don't endorse the decision). If you can access space from phones and he runs the worlds open messaging system that would change a lot... specifically because then governments would have a harder time turning off the internet. I don't see how he could profit massively from that but I do see how it might create something bigger than the arab spring around the world.

> I don't see how he could profit massively from that

It wasn't his reason, then.

Not sure how twitter changes the equation?

Lock down internet so only twitter works for free?

communication :)

You can't communicate without twitter?

> You can't communicate without twitter?

I think that GP was talking about mass communication, specifically the receiving part.

Communication can be broken down into 3 parts: Sending the message, & receiving the message.

Sending the message is straightforward & more or less a solved problem.

Receiving the message is different depending on whether it's only for one/(a few) people or the general public: The former's also a solved problem, & can be made censorship resistant and tamperproof. The current unsolved problem is broadcasting a message out to the general public whilst being censorship resistant.

Microsoft solved this with the likes of winpopup and net send decades ago...

1) > > Sending the message is straightforward & more or less a solved problem.

2) > > Receiving the message is different depending on whether it's only for one/(a few) people or the general public: The former's also a solved problem, & can be made censorship resistant and tamperproof.

3) > > The current unsolved problem is broadcasting a message out to the general public whilst being censorship resistant.

> Microsoft solved this with the likes of winpopup and net send decades ago...

(This is in direct response to the parent supposedly replying to (3))

https://winpopup-lan-messenger.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Messenger_service

The listed solutions only solve (1) and (2), and only in specific circumstances: (3) has still not been fully solved in a censorship resistant manner.

winpopup & net send are only applicable to the devices within a LAN, whilst the solution for (3) needs to be abe to broadcast to everyone in the public space (including people outside of the LAN).

To reiterate: For (3) to be solved, the proposed solution needs to give their users the ability to receive *publicly* broadcasted messages whilst being censorship resistant.

-1 to parent.

It was tongue in cheek to highlight the problems associated with it.

Twitter by no means even attempts to solve this so it is hard to imagine what you are trying to imply.

It is also kind of irrelevant. Because if it worked it wouldn't be usable, you can't let anyone broadcast to anyone it would be spammed to death - something that has been demonstrated with net send.

If by broadcast you mean publish that becomes another thing, but that just creates a needle people need to find. And twitter is not a good solution to that either, even if it was censorship resistant. So again, your point is rather muddy.

Government agencies and many companies only seem to be accessible via Twitter.

It's also the place to find, listen, and reply to public figures.

To sum it up, it's the main place to "broadcast" your message to the world.

That might have been true a decade ago, would not agree today.

In particular I don't think oppressive governments that want to censor or shutdown Internet would be particularly accessible from twitter...

> I don't see how he could profit massively from that

If you can cause the citizenry to get riled up against whichever government is threatening to regulate your endeavors into oblivion, then you can use it as a threat to prevent governments from doing that.

I reckon "cell" is a misnomer in this context. While "cell phone" would've been the only reasonable vernacular in the US a decade ago, the phrase "mobile device" is extremely popular now, and "handset" or "mobile" for brevity would also be pretty good. Satellite-to-mobile, satellite-to-handset, but not satellite-to-cell. Wait, satphone is already a word... use it!

Well the phones are normal cell phones. They talk to ground based cell towers, and the SpaceX satellites are just operating as satellite based cells. A “satellite phone” is a term that historically has been used to describe a device which has been specifically designed to talk to satellites, which is not the case here. The SpaceX service aims to talk to unmodified normal cell phones that were never designed for satellite service.

The phones are not talking to cell towers, they are communicating directly with Starlink satellites. The whole point of the service is to provide emergency coverage in areas not served by cell.

This isn't thinking back to the original meaning of the term cell. While the satellites are not cell towers, they do each serve a specific coverage cell (although that cell moves around over time).

Basically all modern satellites use spot beams, making the "cell" metaphor even more applicable.

The initial announcement made it sound like this would be a drop-in replacement for cell tower coverage. T-Mobile contributing already-licensed spectrum, existing phones are supported, and they plan to eventually support voice and video: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/25/spacex-and-t-mobile-team-up-...

I understand this, but the phones themselves are normal cell phones, designed to talk to stationary cells, which in this use case happen to be talking to satellites. So I think the use of the term "cell phone" is fine.

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