Qualcomm kills its copy of Apple's satellite SOS after ten months | Hacker News Reader

Qualcomm kills its copy of Apple's satellite SOS after ten months

arstechnica.com

24 pointsalwillis8 comments

I assume the problem here is Iridium's airtime rates are some of the highest in the world for being a pole-to-pole satellite system. OEMs are balking at whatever rates Iridium is throwing them that they then have to pass onto consumers making it an inelegant cost to eat all around.

Globalstar, being a North American system and designed fairly more simply than Iridium, has a significant cost advantage for low cost burst data that makes it appealing for Apple to be able to offer at little to low cost.

Both of these systems have their own technical baggage in protocols and standards that make it slightly more complex to integrate in the first place.

Meanwhile, companies like Skylo are starting to hit the ground running with their bent-pipe 3GPP NTN deployment (which is, essentially, 5GNR/LTE with extra satellite extensions) and I think we're going to see more a pivot to NTN-style tech.

Globalstar is a bent-pipe system too, right? For all we know, Apple’s solution could already be based on 5G NTN.

Skimming some of the 3GPP meeting notes, Globalstar definitely seems interested in getting an official 5G frequency identifier for their spectrum.

Apple has heavily invested into Globalstar earth stations; I wouldn’t be surprised if they were running their own RF hardware on some of Globalstar’s spectrum.

Apple's solution is Globalstar. You can tell because their SOS has the same limitation of no responses.

It is impossible to do NTN without new satellites. Starlink is launching new satellites with huge dishes that can do LTE to the ground.

> You can tell because their SOS has the same limitation of no responses.

No, Apple's solution is two-way. The SOS chat is bidirectional.

Globalstar's second generation of satellites don't have the problem with failing S-band amplifiers that has made the first generation an effectively unidirectional constellation.

> It is impossible to do NTN without new satellites.

You can definitely do NTN on existing bent-pipe satellites.

For example, Skylo (used e.g. by "Motorola Rugged" satellite messengers and Android phones) is doing NTN on satellites launched more than a decade ago.

Qualcomm and Iridium were always a strange partnership to me, with Iridium constituting the top shelf option in mobile satellite services (100% global availability, priced accordingly), but Qualcomm not exactly popular for their premium mobile SoC offerings, which would likely be non-competitive if it weren’t for their grasp on the mobile baseband market.

It makes much more sense for Iridium approaching smartphone vendors directly – this is more of a premium offering, and many premium Android phones no longer use Qualcomm SoCs.

And for the low to mid range SOS market, Starlink will likely be a strong competitor (if they actually manage to pull it off).

Since Samsung gave up highend Exynos for a few years, Pixel is the only highend Android phone with non-Qualcomm Tensor chip (aka Exynos with Google). Huawei phones aren't Android.

I imagine their proposal loses to Starlink Direct to Cell, not mentioned in TFA.

https://direct.starlink.com

Remember to do a practice run on Apples Emergency SOS using their demo so you panic a little less if you need to use it for real - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213885#demo

Qualcomm - Iridium - 781 km (485 mi)

iPhone - Globalstar - 1414 km (876 mi)

Starlink (Cell coverage next year) - 570 km (350 mi)

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