Speaking of Starlink, what piqued my interest is that Huawei Mate 60 incorporated satellite call module without being bulky. It is not yet able to do data transfer but in case they can, isnt that practically a portable starlink equivalent?
Satellite phones (and I’ve confirmed this applies to the Huawei Mate 60) connect with satellites in geostationary orbits, meaning an altitude of about 35,786km, adding latency of around 240ms (35786km*2/c ≈ 238.74ms). This can be acceptable for some purposes, but harms things far more than you might imagine. (Source: personal experience with the Australian NBN SkyMesh or whatever it was called before NBN took it over, only once, about five years back. Look, a lot of the internet is located in the USA, and many things perform vastly worse from Australia than from the USA, e.g. several second page loads instead of under one second, and this satellite connection was basically that but even for stuff in Australia, and several times as bad for stuff in America.)
https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
But messaging is only a small part of their task, the main one is geolocation. They're only able to supply short message service where latency isn't really relevant.
Anyway, my point was just that this stuff isn’t equivalent to Starlink. For what satellite phones do, GEO or whatever similar is fine, but the appeal of Starlink certainly requires that it be LEO.
If this is the case it would be too bad though, because Tiantong-1 is indeed geostationary (leading to suitability issues for emergency comms like needing visibility to the Southern horizon) but also only available in the China region.