Starlink plans to launch texting service in 2024, voice/data in 2025
theverge.com
theverge.com
1) Starlink usurps nation-state controls, period. Whether it is enabling service when the local government doesn't want it, or denying service to an ally the US is trying to assist. My hunch is that if Elon keeps pushing it this direction it will be nationalized in order to bring it under government control.
2) The radio aspects are straight forward. As others have mentioned the satellites are just 340 miles away which is about 150 miles closer to earth than Iridium satellites. People have had Iridium satphones from even in the last century :-). Data bandwidth is better with Starlink and satellite to satellite links look like they will work.
3) Starlink is very difficult to jam (ask the Russians). The reason is that the comms are up/down versus side to side so jamming horizontally (typical) has no effect. That said, there are mixed reports of "ddos" jamming which is to say putting a bunch of ground terminals together to suck down bandwidth. As SpaceX retains the capacity to disable individual ground terminals at will this can be manually managed so it is a stop gap effort at best. Serious jamming efforts will probably be devised (a phased array antenna with a decent microwave power amplifier could probably "blind" all of the satellites in 'view') but that will take a while to happen.
4) Phone providers (Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, Etc.) who are still paying off huge debt for the billions they paid for cellular spectrum in various regions will mount a political attack on the effort. I expect submarine campaigns suggesting that Starlink "defrauded" the FCC with its original spectrum licensing requests etc. Random prediction here is that SpaceX ends up making some big payout to spectrum holders to offset the "lost value" of their spectrum investment.
5) And finally, it isn't particularly useful if you are inside. And very much not useful in tunnels/subways etc. We might see a reversion to an old cell concept where the antenna is on your car and your car is your own personal cell tower for your phone. Would not be surprised at that. Also existing cell providers have supported relays in subterranean spaces for a while and I would not be surprised to see SpaceX join them in doing that.
> My hunch is that if Elon keeps pushing it this direction it will be nationalized in order to bring it under government control.
"Nationalize SpaceX" is a fantasy engineered in a clickbait lab to exploit the Rocket Man Bad hype.
Example:
> The U.S. government has requested that Max Polyakov, a wealthy Ukrainian tech entrepreneur, sell his stake in the rocket company Firefly Aerospace Inc., citing national security concerns.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-29/firefly-o...
Book: "How Heavens Went On Sale" by Ashlee Vans talks in details about the raise of commercial space in recent years and ways government deals with the corresponding issues.
... when the problem is the nationality of the owners (ala Firefly). That's not an issue here. It's also not the same thing as "nationalizing," btw.
Nationalizing SpaceX remains firmly in the realm of (hate fueled) fantasy.
Elon is actively working against his own PR. Fantasies like this one are one of the consequences.
The bandwidth you can get from satellite to a handset with a tiny antenna is puny. Everyone is going to want to have a proper data plan instead. But having this as fallback means that you can get some baseline service anywhere (outdoors). And this will actually be amazing for the existing operators, because many of them have service availability requirements for emergency operation, and they have to spend a lot of money maintaining cell towers with no users in remote locations. Starlink as a backstop means they can tear those down.
> Phone providers (Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, Etc.) who are still paying off huge debt for the billions they paid for cellular spectrum in various regions will mount a political attack on the effort. I expect submarine campaigns suggesting that Starlink defrauded the FCC with its original spectrum licensing requests etc.
Didn't TMobile work with Starlink on a product that covers the entire US? How would they be against this?
As the player's get squeezed it is going to get ugly, it always does.
Sorry, but this whole thing is about your regular mobile phone transmitting a signal to a satellite, which was NOT designed to do that. To call this "straightforward" sounds a bit of an oversimplification to me.
Mobile handset signals reach space. There are satellites in orbit that, amongst other things, look for them. It is just one of the ways an agency with space assets can use them to surveil places.
Mobile handsets are programmed with a certain expectation about how cell towers will present themselves to the phone (I know this from working with early Android builds inside Google). They make choices about which tower to use on a moment by moment basis. They also have code that tries to keep them from "annoying" cell towers when people forget to switch them off on planes. Basically heuristics around how often cell towers are showing up, what is their signal level, how is it changing over time, what's my GPS altitude and velocity, etc.
My understanding from an engineer who worked at Qualcomm with T-mobile on their Starlink demonstration[1] (the modem stuff mostly) was that primarily the changes were around cell tower policy not around changes in the signal. (yes, the radio was updated to tune to Starlink's uplink/downlink frequencies as a possible cell tower). His summary was the effort was zero hardware changes, just updates to the software on the phone modem/radio and the Starlink hardware in space.
If there are HW changes that will make it work better, I expect we will see phones marketed as "satellite ready!" in the future. Apple has already started doing some of that with the iPhone.
[1] I met this guy at a swap meet selling test equipment so I could not swear to his bonafides but he certainly understood the radio concepts.
I'm going to rankly speculate you don't know what happens, because if you did it would have been to juicy too withhold.
Or, if I'm wrong-- what in the world are you doing refraining from just saying what happens? Give us the link! I can Google and see they are banned, but I guarantee nearly nobody reading this knows what would actually happen by just turning one on when on Indian soil.
https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/25/india-british-oil-exec-jailed...
You'll be fine, there's no active enforcement.
Sure, if you're caught infiltrating a secure area or something, you're in trouble.
I believe that when I see it.
It is fairly common to use unregistered satellite phones for traveling in the Himalayas.
But my experience might be 3-4 years out of date. Are they cracking down more recently?
Its amazing that Musk and SpaceX delivered Starlink to Ukraine in record time and for unbeatable price while taking loses. And despite that still get shit on for 'denying' things to Ukraine. What an unbelievable spin has been achieved here, its almost Trumpian.
> My hunch is that if Elon keeps pushing it this direction it will be nationalized in order to bring it under government control.
If Elon keeps providing amazing service to US allies?
This being nationalized would be basically a total reverse of US policy that it currently has. Their policy is literally to relay on MORE private suppliers. And they are also doing some of their own in addition.
You got it very wrong.
I didn't think it would actually happen this quickly since I thought it would take some time to scale down the starlink receivers to fit into cell phones.
Turns out they can just do regular ol' LTE right from the satellites and they're close enough for phones to connect?
Although one important caveat is that it will work wherever you can see the sky. So there will still be some dead areas where ground towers and starlink can't reach (though of course that's probably a very small portion, like maybe 5%). But, that seems like a very tractable problem, so I'm sure there will be a solution in short order for those situations. The future is rampaging forward!
To be honest, I think this is already the case for many Europeans, as there is almost always coverage.
There's also some hilly terrain in northeast iowa where you just can't keep a phone call unless you stop your car. The second you crest the peak you lose line of sight.
I wonder what it means for tracking a phone by tower pings.
That's more about not going through trees etc. If you have a line of sight to a cell tower, what keeps you from connecting is mostly the radio trying to be polite and choosing not to talk to a cell tower that's more than some max time delay away. I assume for this they'll tweak the settings, and satellites are good for line of sight.
The max power output is regulatory, but also for power reasons.
And he has a vision beyond what anyone else can see. He makes bold moves that don't always pay off, but do more often than not
He's simply a monster. That's why no-one else can keep up
I think it's a real shame how he represents himself in public, and how the public sees him
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
If he gave more credence to popular/public opinion, he would never have started a rocket company, car company, nor would have made some of the seemingly crazy (but ultimately successful) design choices that people said were insane.
... or as some figure, trying to build up enough tech here to get back to it :)
Not specific to SpaceX, but there's definitely a 'force multiplier' for having the correct environment (managers, organization, compensation, resources, etc) to build things larger than the sum of their parts.
No we wouldn't be anywhere close to it. I fact we would be, much, much, much worse off.
Simply factually speaking, neither ULA, Arianespace or Russia were actually innovating. The chance that any rocket like Falcon 9 existed without SpaceX is essentially 0%. Many of the young engineers at SpaceX would have simply been stuck in the bloated companies that were not innovating.
Tom Mueller himself is also a good example. He was basically the best engine guy on the planet, but he was at TRW and despite being technically better in many cases, lobbying didn't allow to get many contracts.
We can talk about the rest of the leadership, many like Hans Königsman were working at a rocket startup that had very limited chance of every becoming even a modest success.
We can also see it in the simple efficiency of these companies, and their capability to waste talent. Consider that the complete Falcon program, including engine upgrades, re-usability, human-rating, Falcon Heavy and all the 1000s of upgrades likely cost somewhere in the order of 3-4 billion $.
Now consider that the Ariane 6, a minimal upgrade over the Ariane 5 that mostly consists of reusing developments already done for Ariane 5 ME is gone end up costing 5+ billion $.
So if all these engineers were not at SpaceX the industry would simply be smaller, many working on cars or whatever. And those that were in the industry would be working on low impact projects that waste lots of government money.
> Is being a good CEO just taking the better share of workers who would have made the same contribution anywhere
SpaceX relied on leadership from young engineers who would have been responsible for managing like 1 screw on F-35 instead.
The idea that these people would have anywhere close to the same impact if not for SpaceX just doesn't hold up to even minimal investigation.
> or was there something specific about the management/organization/vision at Elon's companies that lead to a higher outcome/worker than would be expected otherwise?
I don't think anybody that looks at the space industry before SpaceX could realistically come to the conclusion that SpaceX was compelte step change for space flight. The largest one arguably since the R-7.
And that's just SpaceX itself, the New Space industry that got inspired and funded largely based on SpaceX success is gigantic. The amount of private investment between 2010-now is incomparably larger then in any other time. And guess what, many of these young engineers from SpaceX are in leadership position in all of these companies. So SpaceX kind of acted like a seed to expand the whole industry.
I think human history has shown over and over in many domains that leadership, vision and strategy are absolutely vital to achieve difficult goals.
And lots of SpaceX most important things were mostly private. So to say its all public funding doesn't really work.
Also a lot of the things he does is not 10x. Look at twitter. He's turned it from the worlds town square to a square filled with a bunch of white dudes in pointy white hats.
Huh? Are we using the same Twitter?
I think if he rolls out the $1 per year to post we’ll see a dramatic drop in bot activity.
Isn’t LTE in L-/S-band? Is the plan to launch new satellites that also have LTE band or do previously launched satellites have a previously unknown LTE band subsystem?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink
Edit: Guess I should have looked a little harder. Here’s a reference to the Gen2 satellites with LTE
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/341576-spacex-asks-fcc-t...
TLDR: Bigger antennas on satellite.
I'm assuming the Starlink satellites have higher gain antennas than the ISS's amateur radio setup, and they definitely have better coverage than the single space station. :)
So, it all depends on the satellites antenna.
This, combined with improvements in antenna design makes it possible to send data to satellites from phones (receiving data is pretty easy, see gps receivers). That said, it will take a long time for you to be able to have high speed satellite internet on your phone.
https://www.satellitetoday.com/5g/2023/09/19/ast-spacemobile...
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/2/23899530/satellite-night-...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/10/0...
[2] https://spacenews.com/ast-spacemobile-discloses-further-sate...
At least my trips to mountains would be more safe as I will be always reach for help when needed.
Being able to call and chat with your friends and family, while you are climbing big wall and sleep on the portable ledges would be really cool as well.
The idea is amazing but I'm skeptical on technicalities.
I don't like his approach necessarily, but am thankful that he and his companies exist.
Is anyone familiar enough with the underlying technology to know if countries would be able to identify individual users or jam the signal easily?
My understanding is the main bottleneck for using Starlink for something like this today, besides the company's willingness to do so, is that the terminals are needed to use the network.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/musk-says-starlink...
Don't we run the risk of Starlink becoming the only player providing this type of global service/access -- and leveraging the information collected from this business for use with advertising or to resell in ways that may not be in the best interest of the subscribers?
Nearly every app, website, phone service, credit union, IoT device is harvesting our data and selling it to the highest bidder with no regard for ethics and privacy -- but you're concerned that Starlink will resell subscriber data.
Starlink is not only providing service where none was available. In many cases, it's providing service in rural areas for a fraction of the cost of other providers who were exploiting people with no other option.
Most importantly, in an age where governments and corporations (including the US) have been working together to censor views that don't align with the current agenda -- increasing services and products that could be censorship-resistant is something that should be applauded -- not shamed.
Or did I misunderstand you?