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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was only 1G and 2G (GSM) that needed to avoid overlap.
This is presumably about 4G/LTE, so mostly between 0.4-2.5 GHz or so.
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?
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.
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.
> Problem with slow data rates is that they clog up the channels.
Yes, we must protect the tubes! :)
(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)
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...