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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

It’s too bad you’ll still need a “regular” cellular sub to take advantage of this. If I didn’t, this gets me a lot closer to “cutting” the wireless plan cord.

I’m usually in wifi range and being able to have a few kb/s of comms is basically the lifeline I need.

Most of my cell activities are cached on my phone: podcasts, maps, some increasingly out of date weather.

Would be even cooler if it could “broadcast” some regular stuff like news and traffic updates (dunno how that could integrate with Waze…)

The first kb/s gets me a loooot of value and each additional is less useful than the last. Data is very much diminishing returns.

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> It’s too bad you’ll still need a “regular” cellular sub to take advantage of this. For the emergency use case: Would it even be legal to require a subscription for 911 calls?

As far as I know, these are possible even without a SIM card in the US and most other countries.

> The first kb/s gets me a loooot of value and each additional is less useful than the last. Data is very much diminishing returns.

And it’s arguably priced accordingly: The difference between metered plans and unlimited data is pretty small these days in my observation.

By lifeline I don’t mean 9-1-1, but rather some basic barebones comms.

> The difference between metered plans and unlimited data is pretty small these days in my observation.

That’s if you have a competitive environment. In Canada, the cellular providers are the fixed-line internet providers and very much don’t want to tank one for the other.

(But maybe Freedom Mobile, without much of a physical wireline footprint, will pull a t-mobile and go all-in on a 5G wireless home internet plan… we can pray)

> In Canada [...]

Oh, yeah, all of these considerations only apply to a somewhat functioning/competitive market, unfortunately.

I have my fingers crossed for you! I've had friends of mine live in Canada for a while – it sounds as bad as (or even worse than) what was going on in Germany in the 2000s, when mobile operators had spent ridiculous sums on 3G licenses and almost ruined themselves in the process financially and as a result just sat out on infrastructure investments for the next decade or so.

Likewise, this would be enough to replace my cell plan. I don’t need high bandwidth stuff, just text communications, PagerDuty, gmail. The rest I can do over Wi-Fi.

Given the price per bit per second per square meter, I'd be surprised if this will be more economical for operators to provide in anything but the most rural areas.

You can get 1 year global plans from esimdb.com pretty affordably for this use case right now.

Thanks, I’ll check them out

No Maps?

Maps can be downloaded offline and directions calculated locally. Only really need updates for traffic (which could be broadcast, which I think some old gps receivers had)

Yeah, I use offline maps. Lack of traffic info is sometimes an issue.

I suppose they need to piggyback on each mobile operator's licensed frequency bands, per country/region.

Looking forward to a future Starlink+Apple/Google collab.

Dunno what frequency this is running at, but if it’s in the 10s of GHz, I’m assuming licensing doesn’t get tooooo pricey given how problematic it is on land-to-land links.

Apple/Google don't hold any RF spectrum rights worldwide...

This is presumably about 4G/LTE, so mostly between 0.4-2.5 GHz or so.

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

> Apple/Google don't hold any RF spectrum rights worldwide...

yet. Apple (and android baseband suppliers, “Google” may be the wrong name to mention here), have the ability to take relatively worthless spectrum and make it widely useful in a way nobody else can.

I wonder how spectrum allocation works for C-Band satellite broadcasters that just blast continents with their signals. Grandfathered?

Those several-GHz bands don't really work indoors.

Most satellite-y things don’t and Starlink’s direct to cell won’t either.

Hence why the spectrum should be pretty cheap (along with its incredible susceptibility to obstructions… which is less of an issue when you’re going roughly “up” without pesky considerations like curvature of the earth)

And you do get a ton of gain with a small antenna at those high frequencies.

> and Starlink’s direct to cell won’t either

I could see it kinda working, at low frequencies. They are not that far away and there's not many things blocking the signal besides your roof.

Me too, but at slower data rates. At 550km above, that’s still a big signal loss by inverse square law. Problem with slow data rates is that they clog up the channels.

The inverse square law effect can be remedied using similar tech as in the Starlink consumer antennas. You aim the signal to where it's consumed.

> Problem with slow data rates is that they clog up the channels.

Yes, we must protect the tubes! :)

Phased arrays work without having to repoint, but they don't overcome lack of incidence (insolation?)

(e.g. we can't build a solar panel that works perpendicular to the sun (or nearly perpendicular) using phased array technology because there just isn't much solar radiation hitting the "dish" in the first place)

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple were to end up buying Globalstar, which would get them access to valuable globally available L-band spectrum.

They have already invested hundreds of millions into Globalstar's ground station hardware [1] and future satellite launches [2].

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/11/emergency-sos-via-sat...

[2] https://spacenews.com/apple-loans-globalstar-252-million-for...

It works with existing 4G/LTE phones, so it will be using the standard 4G/LTE bands, which run up to 2.6 Ghz.

Presumably that's why SpaceX needs to ride on existing mobile operators: they already own LTE spectrum and can allocate a chunk of it for satellite services. It would be a lot of work (and cost) for SpaceX to go out and buy LTE spectrum in every country they want to operate in.

Sacrificing a chunk of that precious spectrum is huge though. Is LTE flexible enough to run some form of on-demand TDM between multiple base stations on top of it? Can it operate smaller cells on the same channels within the range of the larger cell, forcing the smaller cell to make do with other parts of the spectrum while the larger calls dibs?

Afaik older cellular protocols were relying on zero overlap between base stations serving the same frequencies, leading to a nice coloring problem that would seriously suffer if someone tried to fit in LEO cells.

I'm no LTE expert, but I'm pretty sure that it handles overlap: you can run LTE diagnostic apps on Android that will display all the visible base stations - often many are visible, sometimes 3 or more on the same band. Your phone looks at what's available and picks a combination with the best signal strength (sometimes it will connect on 2 or 3 different bands simultaneously with carrier aggregation).

But even then, most carriers have many bands/channels (EARFCNs) available - and presumably only a small slice of bandwidth is needed for this service considering it's (initially) only for text messages. Finding 5 Mhz on one of the higher LTE frequencies wouldn't be so hard for many carriers, even if it does need an exclusive channel.

TDM seems difficult with the long time delays to satellites, but maybe. LTE is pretty flexible and can use bands as small as 1.4 MHz.

It was only 1G and 2G (GSM) that needed to avoid overlap.

SpaceX has applied to test the service at an Apple office

SpaceX already works with Google, where Google allows Starlink to use its datacenters' network connectivity for downlink, while Google gets to use Starlink for data transfer.

There's other potential advantage (or disadvantage depending on how you view it). Some countries like India don't like sat phones on their territory. Some countries like Russia are ok with them but require local connection to terrestial networks and local licenses. Some countries are in territorial disputes. What if SpaceX or other such company decide (or would be "gently asked to") it could ignore local regulations in such country? What if it would be done for good? Possible example: somebody lobbies ITU(via some kind of "emergency license for humanitarian purposes only") to allow SpaceX to allow SpaceX to serve Gaza for free with limits and USA is ok with it. Israel is against it but what they could do? Jam Starlink? What if they also use it? What if 10 years in future same thing is done to North Korea(it could be even more legal - as far as I understood, both Koreas claims they are only legitimate goverment of Korea so SK could issue formal license)?

You'd expect T-Mobile/starlink to provide this service for free?

No, I want to sign up for it without bundling it with a local Canadian oligopolist’s other services.

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