SpaceX launches first phone service satellites
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Sources:
- https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1742396904619581642
- https://twitter.com/TMFAssociates/status/1742430541574791566
Put gigantic satellites that unfold using the tech from snap-bracelets and compensate for distance with a gigantic antenna: https://ast-science.com/spacemobile-network/bluewalker-3/
With how many cell-phone providers and towers out there, I have no doubts they'll all be up to their eyeballs in work on this. Also, SpaceX just lost funding and might be trying to pick up some of the rural broadband funds Lynk and ASTS are going for: https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-loses-appeal-to-receive-88...
>SpaceX launched a rocket on Tuesday carrying the first set of Starlink satellites that can beam signals directly to smartphones from space.
I don't think this was intentionally deceptive. If the headline said "North Korea launches first rocket" it would be clear that it meant North Korea's first rocket, not the first rocket ever
I can see how this could be confusing though if you're not familiar with the existence of other satellite phones, and maybe a journalist should be held to high standards for clarity when writing headlines.
AST and SpaceX are the leaders in this space as far as I know.
LTE, text only, with voice and browsing coming supposedly in 2025 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/spacex-launches-...
Why is everyone trying so hard to shit on this? It's going to be awesome when we have truly global commercial cellular coverage that works with unmodified existing phones. SpaceX is almost certainly going to be the first to get there, but I hope many competitors get there soon after.
I think it's obvious, but I'll explain anyway, cause I have little better to do at the moment:
1) cause the headline is sensationalist and isn't true, 2) above is multiplied by dislike for Musk, cause SpaceX is positioned as Musk & pals.
This is a tech and nerd forum. Let us be excited about new technology.
AST's satellite wasn't "old style satellite internet". It was at an altitude of 513km. That's roughly the same altitude as SpaceX's satellites (~550km).
AST's satellite was absolutely "new technology", last September.
SpaceX was beat for the "first phone service satellites", even for low orbit 5G satellites with unmodified phones.
https://ast-science.com/2023/09/19/ast-spacemobile-achieves-...
Looks like they used 800MHz, so basically the longest range cell phone bands. Which is about as expected, none of that super-fragile millimeter wave stuff.
SpaceX is using 1900MHz, which will make a difference but probably not a huge difference.
Let alone more subtle but important information like whether it's 5G in both directions.
It's the same old re-inventing the wheel with Musk cult of personality marketing slapped on top of it.
New thing of the 2020s is the mRNA vaccine which solved a big problem, people took it and then endlessly bitched about it while mirin and salivating at the Tesla cybertruck or the 300k Tesla Roadster which will never enter into production.
It doesn't pay to build stuff and innovate nowadays, it's more about conning people into thinking that some stuff will be built sometime in the future™ and it will be revolutionary, and then move the goalposts perpetually into the future™
Innovation serves as a means to an end, like for example mRNA vaccines solved a big problem like COVID.
SpaceX doesn't solve any problem, 90% of the global population lives in urban areas, they connect to the internet using cell towers propagating 3/4/5G and good old fiber or fiber+copper
The remaining 10% is too poor so they cannot afford it, and they are also unskilled so if they want a shot a decent life they'd have to move to cities too where they can start as manual laborers and slowly climb the social ladder, they'd have to do it either independently or thanks to help from NGOs, UNICEF, UN, Doctors without borders etc. To put it bluntly fast internet is the last of their necessities.
SpaceX is textbook SV self dealing and wealth isolation where a bunch of assholes (led by the Chief Asshole of SV) who want to play with rockets and get paid for it , so they try to retroactively find a pitch to sell to VCs and asset managers to finance their play time and they do so by pitching them stuff like:
"Internet on your 10M sailboat" or
"Internet on your 2M Luxury RV"
And of course they get billions because VCs are also loaded and so they painted themselves so much in the corner with their wealth that the only thing that makes them enthusiastic is thin marginal improvement to trophy assets like a 10M sailboat or a 2M luxury RV, stuff that is totally uncorrelated with what regular consumers want or what the economy at large needs.
I live in a rural area (the nearest town has a population of ~500) and use Starlink. I’m a photographer/software developer. My wife is a financial analyst. We have friends or family in the area that are teachers, engineers, nurses, small business owners, etc. Not everyone living outside of a large city is a freaking coal miner.
My wife works remotely and I need to upload large amounts of data for my job. Starlink has probably done more to help with housing prices in cities than every politician in the US combined as it allows people to work remotely anywhere.
This only happens organically in the US and Northern Europe due to double condition of incredibly high GDP and a geographic morphology which is incredibly sparse and/or with lots of mountains and rugged terrain. 2 or 3 countries =! the world.
> > My wife works remotely
In light of this, you being able to negotiate a good compensation while working 100% remotely, in sectors that can be both defined by economists as advanced tertiary services then who has to get out of their bubble?
I am sure Sudanese villagers will be able to do just the same if you provide them with Starlkinks. Not!
Canada too. Also Australia. Don't forget New Zealand. Friends in Mexico use it to work remotely. South Africa too. Also remember Argentina, Brazil and Chile.
Also, I don't want to debate the specifics of starlink or spacex, but starlink isn't really that much more expensive at all compared to average internet pricing here in Canada outside of the big 3 cities. Also, if SpaceX isn't useful for anyone, who is filling and buying all those launches (outside of starlink)? Are the satellite operators that use SpaceX also useless?
Unfortunately cancer and viruses will always be with us. The secular trend of people moving to cities will not reverse, that's because of technical realities such as industrial and transportation economies of scale, critical mass of intellectual power and problem solving, logistics in food processing and distribution etc.
People live in cities for convenience and go to the wilderness for re-creation.
> > but starlink isn't really that much more expensive at all compared to average internet
Because it's subsidised by the military AKA tax dollars and VCs AKA future pension dollars of pensioneers and policyholders who are forced at gunpoint to part with some of their wages because government think they are too stupid to administrate their funds on their own.
This clicked when I saw an employee review at SpaceX https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-SpaceX-RVW...
Likewise there's an early DARPA project for basically any technology you care to name. That says a lot about US budgetary politics and not much about the tech itself. Spend a few hundred million on most research and development and it's a big-government boondoggle; make it a national security appropriation and no one in Congress will bat an eye.
Those young engineers have worked really hard and done some extremely impressive things. Perfectly possible to acknowledge that, whatever you think of the majority shareholder.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellat...
Lots of interesting stories from their time (flares, collisions, market issues). It wasn't regular cell though, so maybe Starlink will do better.
There is a big jump from going from device that have to pay for and pay subscription to working with every iPhone for free. Nobody knows if partner providers will charge extra for service or not but it should be free.
Will it work with every iPhone? I don't think it will.
So, not that big of a jump.
For Starlink Direct-to-cell, they are partnering with mobile providers, like T-Mobile in the US. I can't find it, but my understanding is that it will be included in the service. It will be incentive for people to use T-Mobile.
If we're looking at non-iphones, the fraction likely gets even worse. Remember 3g was only shut down a couple years ago. And this requires 5g to work? As in 2 entire generations newer?
But yeah, I also haven't found any confirmation it would be free for T-Mobile customers (who have the right phones), so I think it's safe to assume it won't be until we get that. It'd be cool if true, though!
Or, to view it from the opposite end of humanity, you could send a text message with gps coordinates and a time, and a high altitude loitering drone will put a mortar round or simple smart bomb at that spot.
What a dismal prospect that would be. Why bother going at all? Might as well plug ourselves into those bio-pods from the Matrix and be done with it.
I've been exploring the most remote corners of the planet for over a decade now, and while I understand what you're saying, constant connectivity is not a problem if you don't want it to be.
I personally don't have a phone, and I prefer not to have "comms" when I go out. I want to be in the wilderness, not connected.
So what I do is carry a turned off sat communicator tucked away safely in my "go bag". If something ever goes badly wrong (worse than it has so far), it will save my life.
Totally worth it.
There's always going to be that one person blasting music in the wilderness, just because some people want to be disconnected doesn't mean we should eschew progress towards tech that can save peoples' lives.
It's not the same; that's just play-acting, and one will not be able to pretend one doesn't know that.
These are _not_ the first satellites with such capability, other competitors are working on such constellations as well: https://www.space.com/spacex-launches-1st-5g-satellite-inter...
Edit: Actually there are plenty of third party app stores for Android already - including several from popular phone manufacturers[1]. The main barrier is probably getting developers to put their software on these stores and getting consumers to buy from them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Android_app_stores
To truly escape the walled gardens of the cell phone world, it would seem you need to control the entire stack from carrier up to device and application.
Edit: I know very little about 5G and satellite tech, but love to learn more
train : plane :: land line : cell phone :: terrestrial : satellite
The big challenge/opportunity will come when a non-US player arrives, like Thuraya after Iridium and the NSA can't slurp down all telephony.
Even if they were cheaper, a satellite is limited to 7Mbits/s. A 5G tower can handle 10Gbits/s. And you don't even have to price a cell tower by the kilogram.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1742396904619581642
> Note, this only supports ~7Mb per beam and the beams are very big, so while this is a great solution for locations with no cellular connectivity, it is not meaningfully competitive with existing terrestrial cellular networks.
And to think he often overstates things.
A modern cell tower can handle a lot of throughput overall because it can slice a cell site into a lot of small sectors and handle a lot of clients in it. A single satellite covers many, many square miles even with a very, very narrow beam. Plus you're just dealing with vastly different SNR, power levels, speed differentials, etc.
It probably isn't physically possible to do phone with Starlink high speed service. The dedicated antenna would be better than existing 4G/5G but small size would be a problem. Also, the Starlink antennas depend on having good view of the size.
Finally, the market is tiny of people wandering in the wilderness who want high-speed data. Starlink competes with itself since its service can be used for remote camps; there are rumors of a smaller antenna. Starlink even makes it easier to setup wilderness cell towers and microcells at house.
I don't remember the exact figures, but the limit might be somewhere around 1 gb/s per 50 square miles or something. Contrast this with fiber fed cell towers. The fiber can carry unimaginable amounts of data, and data capacity keeps going up as endpoints are upgraded without laying new fiber. The tower's transmissions only cover a small area which can be a disadvantage but also has the advantage that it does not interfere with other nearby towers. Towers can be upgraded as well. For example, a tower might start with an omnidirectional antenna to cover the entire area. As more people start using it, it can transition to using a large number of sector antennas in a circle, each only covering a few degrees.
So, looking at it from the perspective of subscriber per square mile, satellites have a hard limit, and it's quite low, while terrestrial wireless has almost no limit.
This means that there is a certain subscriber density where satellite makes more sense, and a certain subscriber density where terrestrial makes more sense. The subscriber density where satellite makes more sense is probably far lower than you might expect.
Satellites are cheaper per square mile, but they can only provide a sliver of service when they're covering such a large range.
If satellites were competitive anywhere with moderate density, a simple extra-big tower would be even more competitive. But we need more than that to split up users into smaller groups.
A simple google search for cost to launch a satellite comes back with "between $10 and $400 million dollars". And cost to build a cell tower being "around $250,000."
If it costs $100k to run a mile of fiber, which would be very high, then you could run about 95 miles to a new tower before you even get to the low end of satellite costs.
This means, for the cost of a single satellite, you can run about 13 macrocells. In addition, the infrastructure for those cells can last much longer and maintenance is much cheaper.
The only place that satellites makes sense is in remote areas where people aren't clustered as closely. Satellite is great at covering vast swaths of land with fewer subscriptions. So an area that would require 13 or more macrocells or an absurd amount of fiber optics to service a couple hundred people is perfect for StarLink.
The equation will change a lot if or when Falcon Heavy starts operating though. Then we will be able to blot out the stars with relatively inexpensive satellites. But I foresee StarLink using ground cells in denser areas anyways to reduce space traffic since you can't just cluster the satellites over a specific area. Probably they will just rent out the nodes to existing providers to expand cell coverage.
So the days of my carrier forcing me to buy a new phone every few years are over? Sweet. About time they knocked it off with this constant infrastructure churn.
(FYI Falcon Heavy is operational, I think you mean Starship.)
I'm kidding, of course. I don't think anyone actually believes elmu thinks about physics. He pays people to do that while he shitposts on the internet.
There was story on here recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38322966, about company that launched a constellation of small satellites. The US has lots of radio surveillance satellites that likely can track phones. Also, phone companies sell phone location data.