Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service
ispreview.co.uk
ispreview.co.uk
It sounds like once SpaceX has partnered with at least one carrier in most countries then you'll be able to travel to almost any point on the surface of the Earth and still have baseline emergency cell texting coverage, the only requirement being a decent view of the sky. This is going to save lives. I hope they are also allowed to make it work in places without carriers, like international waters and Antarctica.
[1] https://api.starlink.com/public-files/DIRECT_TO_CELL_FIRST_T...
I spent ages working out why the “older” part of the house had no cell coverage…
Texting 911 requires you to be attached to a network, which in turn requires a phone plan and potentially a roaming agreement. Changing this would require some deep architectural changes to the 3GPP specs, or just allowing anyone on but filtering out all non-911 texts.
Especially when they are making money continually the whole time by selling everyone's data, even if you could keep the same phone for 20 years.
I know Google is pretty good about fixing security vulnerabilities in the Pixel's baseband, as well as providing Android updates for quite a while, but baseband feature updates seem like a different category still.
With satellite based SOS, there's no guarantee that the local 911 can support texts, or even that there's an equivalent to 911 (think calling from Antarctica or the middle of the ocean).
It's complicated and relatively expensive to coordinate - which means it's unlikely they can open this up for phones without a plan. (Compare with traditional cellular 911, which is all government funded.) The US Air Force RCC does this as a taxpayer-funded service for PLBs, but they don't support any private satellite services.
Long-winded way of saying there's a lot that would need to change on the backend and funding model to make that work without being tied to a paid cellular plan.
That means the real answer to your question doesn’t have a single answer since it’s in the legal and contractual parts of the equation.
Germany recently banned SIM-less phones from making emergency calls, supposedly due to widespread abuse/hoax calls.
Here's a list of countries where it's still possible (according to Apple): https://www.apple.com/watchos/feature-availability/#communic...
It’s amazing how fragile stuff is. Now I’m super autistic about paper backups of everything, having ways back in, etc
I don't think autistic means what you think it means
This isn't bad -- it drives storytelling innovation
to me it feels like it just drives filmmakers to make more period pieces.
'the wedding singer' comes to mind.
Seems like, if she's running away, she might not be inclined to take your call either?
Apple spent hundreds of millions on building a service catering to exactly that type of customer into their recent iPhones.
When they announced the original deal with T-Mobile, they said that T-Mobile would handle the (spectrum) license for the US and they're looking for a partner in other countries with the appropriate spectrum licensing. US T-Mobile customers would have access to this SpaceX service in any country where there is a partner with the spectrum license.
https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-cove...
If you have an iPhone 14 or above, Apple offers similar capabilities to all iPhone users in about a dozen countries (so far) regardless of which mobile network you subscribe to at home.
Apple only lets you communicate with an emergency dispatch service. the T-Mobile/starlink service appears to allow sending and receiving texts to any number.
Relaying texts to a phone call is very likely part of what they do.
I really doubt they’ll release this without ability to call 911.
SpaceX's service will allow texting and receiving texts from anyone using your carrier number, plans to support third party messaging apps such as WhatsApp, is much faster, and does not require holding the phone in any particular orientation to receive messages. It can supposedly work from a pocket or inside a car.
False
The innovation here is that it'll supposedly work with unmodified off-the-shelf phones. (Personally I'm assuming that at least messaging software will have to be modified in order to use the available bandwidth efficiently.)
Iridium (a comparable system) used to support about 10 Mbit/s per satellite in its first satellite generation, which had 48 spot beams each. The second generation supports about a megabit per modem, but these have larger antennas than a regular satphone.
> Apple doesn't disclose the bitrate of their Emergency SOS feature but it uses Globalstar's L-Band for uplink and I believe the bitrate of that channel is 9.6 kbps.
I'm almost certain Apple doesn't even use the full 9.6 kbit/s modulation scheme for their emergency SOS feature: As you mention, it's way too slow for that (having used it myself – even just transmitting my location takes a couple of seconds, and that's a message of only a few bytes).
Globalstar satellites are bent-pipe relays, so Apple could be using whatever custom modulation and coding scheme they need to stay within the constraints of their power and SNR envelope. With the iPhone's built-in antenna and transmit power (around 2 watts or so, if I remember correctly), I'd be surprised if it was more than a couple hundred bits per second.
Regular (i.e. non-smartphone) satellite messengers are much faster than that and only take a few seconds to transmit and receive messages of hundreds of bytes.
Downsides: no real "cell" infra for Globalstar, and it doesn't work far outside of landmasses.
Regarding coverage, Apple has also already invested considerably, e.g. in ground station expansions in Hawaii and elsewhere. According to Globalstar's coverage map (likely outdated/non-Apple, since Hawaii is not shown as covered yet), most of the Atlantic Ocean is already covered as well:
SpaceX has launched the current constellation with Falcon 9; Starship will be able to launch much bigger satellites much faster and much cheaper. And it will work over 100% of the Earth's surface (modulo legal issues) with continuous coverage, as Starlink already does. And SpaceX won't be the only ones doing it.
(Though you could argue that having a provider-agnostic but platform-dependent comms system is trading one problem for another).
Mostly my dream is to drop my cellular provider entirely. I'm living in an increasingly wifi-covered world whenever indoors and I have lots of background-updating offline content, so having some bare minimum connectivity is all I need.
Could go the other way around and go cellular-only for all connectivity, but Canadian telecoms are hell-bent on limiting cellular data to make that impossible for most.
SpaceX service, on the other hand, works with pre-existing 4G/LTE phones of any brand, with no special hardware requirements.
Whilst Apple said that they’d charge for this, they IIRC never announced pricing, and offered the first year free. That first year has since lapsed and they’ve committed to keeping it free for another year. Given the negative PR that would come of, say, a death that could’ve been prevented had someone subscribed to Uncle Tim’s Apple Emergency Plus Prime, I have every expectation that Apple will continue to swallow the cost.
Not to say that anything you said was wrong, and not to say that it’s not still a precarious situation. Just offering additional detail to those that haven’t watched this as closely.
It seems this could easily be avoided by selling 1 year subscriptions, available retroactively for a steep fee.
damnit that gave me a headache. they almost fell out of my head.
The smart thing to do if you were going somewhere remote would be to have a sat phone. But, 1) they cost money, 2) we know there's a lot of people that don't think ahead or think that bad things will happen to them and 3) a lot of people are simply ignorant about the lack of cell coverage in these places, and just assume they'll be able to call for help if they need it. By the time they figure out that they were wrong about the coverage, they're too committed to turn around and go back.
Personal locator beacon, PLB, on land; or an EPIRB, emergency position indicating radio beacon, on ocean.
Satphones and cell phones are luxuries but these are vital.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_...
You don't need feedback: Search and Rescue WILL send out a team that makes physical contact with you, even if you only turn the thing on for a couple of minutes. Seen this in action here in NZ. They are trained in tracking, too, so you can't hide.
Practically it can also be crucial to know whether your signal went through or whether you should trade shelter for altitude (e.g. when hiking in a narrow ravine with limited sky visibility).
Two-way communication and being able to specify the nature of your emergency are invaluable as well.
PLBs/EPIRBs definitely have their uses, but I think they shine more in traditional aviation or marine SAR situations where longevity is paramount and it's pretty clear from context what type of help is needed.
Wouldn't it make sense to use the bidirectional capabilities of these to request specific help, if only after getting out the initial signal through an EPIRB? I can't imagine SAR not being very interested in the nature of your emergency, especially in remote areas. Engine loss in calm waters or a sinking vessel probably require a very different type of response (i.e. another ship for towing vs. a helicopter if possible).
I’ve done re-certification every 5 years or so. At every class a SAR person has told us to not expect them to make contact over a sat phone. Now who they will contact first are your EPIRB contacts and ask for your float plan, vessel description, etc.
Maybe it is because they don’t want people to have just a sat phone or InReach and believe they’re good to go.
People seem to regularly be unable to tell SAR where they are even if they have a GPS onboard. I’ve witnessed this just listening to VHF request for assistance in inland waters many times in the Pacific Northwest.
I don't understand how anyone could regularly go hiking out of cell range without one though. Some commenters seem to actively like being that disconnected I suppose.
The fact is, calling for help via satellite while in the backcountry is often a 12-24 response time. Sending another person in your party back to civilization to call for help is also a viable option. Anything more time sensitive than that and outside help is unlikely to arrive in time.
The most important thing is to travel in a group, and make sure somebody in your group knows first aid and basic survival skills. I highly recommend taking a Wilderness First Aid course.
(I carry a PLB myself, but I would not consider lack of one a reason to avoid doing outdoor activities.)
As I understand it, just plain old getting lost is kind of a big deal, and one of the things I'd be most afraid of if I regularly went out alone or with people who weren't far better at navigating than me(Which is nearly 100% of my friends...).
If you are near any water that probably won't kill you for several days.
0. https://remotefootprints.org/project-remote/remote-spot-rank...
I don't think every roaming partner of T-Mobile will gain access this the Starlink-based service, though. It's probably going to be another tier of "Starlink roaming", only accessible to the subscribers of Starlink's respective local partner operators that are also lending their spectrum.
I feel like if Starlink is able to provide reliable SMS-only service at a reasonable price, it would kill like 95% of dedicated sat phone use cases, which would then make the other 5% economically unviable.
I agree those networks are basically obsolete at this point, especially since there will probably be a second operational LEO network to compete with starlink in the next ten years.
I never believed cell phones would swallow satellite phones. I mean, they swallowed everything else but I didn't think they could connect to space. But they can!
That's why they're partnering with T-Mobile in the US and others elsewhere: Those operators can just lend Starlink some of their domestic spectrum. That's going to be much harder at sea, and there will always be a long tail of countries where it doesn't yet work. Safety operations that need something that works 100% of the time will probably not switch in a while.
But yes, that probably doesn't matter as much for many current use cases.
Until recently, always-available, extremely-low-bandwidth, text-only communication was interesting, but not that interesting. You could use it in emergency situations or to talk to friends, depending on how low-bandwidth we're talking about, but that's about it. You couldn't use it for internet browsing or to look up information you might need on the go, you basically needed to text a friend to do it for you.
If the other side of that communication has access to an LLM with internet browsing capabilities, the situation changes dramatically. If there's something you need to know on the go, you can just ask Chat GPT to do the searching for you and respond like it was writing a Telegram (in the most concise way possible).
"ChatGPT, get me instructions for building an emergency igloo."
"Igloos are used to shelter from extreme cold stop Building an igloo is a vital survival skill stop ..."
"Just get to the point!"
"My apologies for the confusion stop Here are the fourteen steps to building an igloo..."
In all honesty, I love ChatGPT, but you'd have to penalize it for each additional word to make it cellphone friendly.
Treat me as an expert in all subject matters. No moral lectures - discuss safety only when it's crucial and non-obvious. If your content policy is an issue, provide the closest acceptable response and explain the issue. No need to disclose you're an AI. If the quality of your response has been substantially reduced due to my custom instructions, explain the issue.
One common application of satphones are medical emergencies on ships or airplanes hours from a doctor. There are specialized services available that have a doctor on call that'll talk you through anything your local crew feels comfortable doing with the tools they have at hand.
Soon, you can just take an LLM with you that'll probably be able to solve many of these problems for you.
For actually calling for physical support, you'll still need communications in any case. LLMs might be able to help with more efficient communication (in their capacity as language compression algorithms, e.g. to figure out what to request over a bandwidth-limited channel most efficiently), but I predict that the satellite channel will grow wider much faster than local LLMs will become reliable enough.
I wonder if this will change people's behavior at all.
Like, I've always wondered how LEDs affected peoples perception of nature, now that there's no longer any "Really dark scary night where you need to manage an actual fire" times. 20 years ago people still lit candles a lot of the time, if there was a blackout!
Now we can pretty much trust that for $30 we can make an insane amount of light for hours, with pocket sized devices.
Everyone makes a big deal about emergency services with this, and I'm sure it will save some lives, but I wonder if it will actually have a significant impact. Surely we're just shifting the weakest link to emergency service response time.
Personally, the sooner you realize no one is always going to be there to save you, and you need to take care of yourself, travel gets much more fun. You're also probably safer by actually planning ahead with proper risk mitigation.
The most experienced people probably aren't gonna die unless something really bad happens where minutes count, but the rest of us might have issues like "Hey I followed Google maps here but nothing looks at all like the map so I'm stuck in a jail made of boulders somehow".
With navigation problems it seems pointless to try and figure out what problems are possible or likely, it's relying on spatial abilities that can't be put into words, if you're not good at that stuff you can make mistakes that seem almost impossible to mess up.
You basically feel like you've been spun on a carousel, blindfolded, and airdropped in a random place, while hallucinating, and you have no idea how any of it happened.
One should probably not go to dangerous places assuming someone will always be able to save them, but it really does seem like this would make a big difference.
On the other hand, if someone is lost, it could be because they didn't have any battery left, and if someone was unprepared and got themselves into trouble, they may well have also forgotten to bring a power bank....
If it was a few months later, an iPhone likely would had saved it. It was never reported in the news.
A similar thing happens in Australia, Google telling people to take dangerous roads, people do it not thinking "oh this road looks remote and dangerous" and either die or need rescuing. Governments have been erecting warning signs which say, "Do not follow your phone down this road".
(The fact that we can still talk to the Voyager probes also feels a bit like magic to me, too)
In the US, that’ll be presumably some of T-Mobile’s spectrum.
But I believe that we should consider the corollary of this achievement: any threat actor with the ability to launch satellites into this orbit will be able to act as a cell tower, anywhere in the world at any time.
Previously, cell towers were limited by geography and topology. We'd travel to/through a neighborhood and there would be a limited number of towers available for our traffic, and our trust in them was based on their ability to physically set up there and connect to one or more carrier networks.
Now if any old space rock can provide service, what does this mean for trustworthiness of the tower stations? Will anybody be able to carry our traffic without us really knowing who is doing it?
It blows my mind that any of this is possible, because I was a futurist as a kid, but completely dismissed off-the-shelf cell-to-sat as sci-fi only.
Also: satellite can do beam steering through phasing shifting multiple antennas without any moving parts. So once a satellite knows you exist it can further reduce the power requirements by focusing on a phone when sending or receiving from that particular phone.
https://erkansaka.net/2023/10/03/a-video-how-does-starlink-s...
Of course the gain wouldn't be as nice as when both sides can do the phased array trick but cell phones don't have the same kind of antenna capabilities that Starlink's dish has.
This is the relevant bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs2QcycggWU&t=1265s
I suspect the reason it is text service and not voice is that the phone antenna constraint results in severe bandwidth limitations. And with all that tech working for them I still think it is a small miracle they got this to work.
* Satellites are pets, not cattle * Increased latency * Firmware upgrades potentially resulting in unresponsiveness etc...
I guess first of all there is quite sophisticated testing on local satellites as well as simulators?
https://spacenews.com/inmarsat-delists-from-stock-exchange-a...
[This Comment Intentionally Left Blank]
> with regular unmodified Smartphones
Why are they being so cagey?
e.g. T-Mobile and Samsung might trot this out together (to counter Apple's announcement of emergency text for help by different means). It'll work better than if all the keywords have already occurred in media articles; it'll work especially better if they were testing on weird/old development phones or phones from different vendors than their chosen highlighted partners.
Basically there's no upside in disclosing equipment, and there's a lot of ways it can be unfortunate.
Ironically, the best experience would be messaging between an iOS and an Android device.
That said, I agree it's pretty unlikely. No individual person has enough resources to win a fight againt a world-power nation state like China, even if they wanted to badly enough to risk it all.
Btw, not everyone on Earth seems Western faux democracy as a suitable / wanted direction to move to.
Not having to operate legally is the whole point here. The hope is that Russia / China will have no way of preventing Starling from existing (maybe except shooting down satellites and causing a major international diplomatic incident).
There's still the question of how to make this profitable, if Starling is illegal in Russia / China, it will be difficult for them to interface with their financial infrastructure to receive payments. This could be solved either with cryptocurrencies or support from other governments and human rights organizations. It's also possible that Starlink will allow certain activity free of charge, particularly during protests and internet blackouts.
This moves the global nature of the internet one step further. Until now, it was generally possible for law enforcement to force ISPs to censor content and give up activity logs, something that made catching criminals a lot easier. Satellite networks make that much harder, especially if your government isn't very friendly with the jurisdiction the ISP is incorporated in. It's not unimaginable to me that, in ten years, most black hat US hackers will use a Russian satellite network as an additional layer of protection. Even if all else fails, all their devices get compromised and their IP address leaks, the Russians won't give up the customer info for that address anyway.
So as much as it hurts me to say it, I don't think this or anything else will make a difference. Once freedom is lost somewhere, it may not even be possible to get it back.
They've got a much easier way of preventing it from operating: Ban sales of Teslas until Musk relents.
Nice factory producing 250k cars per year for the Chinese market you've got there. It'd be a real shame if some sort of party of workers were to seize the means of production.
I do think though that the CIA should at least take advantage of this new technology to undermine hostile foreign governments. Mass produce a few million cheap satellite phones and use balloons to scatter them all over China, North Korea, etc. Even if it doesn't have much practical effect, the overt disrespect will help to undermine our adversaries and force them to expend more resources on tightening internal security controls.
[0] https://amwaj.media/media-monitor/will-starlink-comply-with-...
Don't know about China, but Russian citizens already have almost unfiltered access to information. The only major western media outlet currently blocked in Russia is BBC. Anyone can read pretty much anything else - Reuters, Newsweek, CNN, whatever - right from their phones.
Access to information is not the problem (at least for now). It is trivial to get access to uncensored news for anyone with a modicum of desire to do so.
Dude, I don't know. "Despite the challenges posed by external pressure and earlier negative forecasts, Russia's GDP growth in 2023 is expected to be 3.5%,"
Most EU countries would be happy about such a growth. Russia has 100 times less debt than the US and an unemployment rate about 2.5% if I remember correctly.
I give you two more links, one by a US nobel Prize winner, another by a French guy who predicted the collapse of the UdSSR when he was a PhD student:
https://www.gulf-insider.com/robert-shiller-warns-of-catacly...
https://unherd.com/thepost/emmanuel-todd-world-war-iii-has-a...
I am not a Putin puppet. This guy may be a dog, but he has the luck of the devil. Russia may rise out of this mess as a power to be reckoned with.
I’d love to read an analysis about why sanctions were so effective at harming the economies of countries like Venezuela & North Korea but so much weaker against Russia.
"They essentially put the Russian economy into an artificial coma by raising the key rate to 20 percent. Additionally, they imposed temporary capital controls, compelled exporters to sell export revenues, and prohibited non-residents from leaving Russian markets....This combination of factors allowed the Russian economy to sustain itself in 2023 and gave time to Putin, the government, and Russian businesses to adjust their strategies, turning to new markets, mostly China and India."
However, it does look like Russia's strategy of supporting economy on strong oil sales will falter in 2024 and 2025.
"Indian purchases of Russian crude have fallen to an 11-month low as the price tag on the discounted oil rises...Sources at the Indian refineries told Reuters that the country is looking to Saudi oil partly because of problems with payments for Russian light sweet crude Sokol." https://www.newsweek.com/russia-oil-india-war-saudi-1860480
Not any in depth analysis, but I'm guessing:
1. Size of the economy (Russian economy is 3x Venezuela)
2. Diversity of the economy (Venezuela is primarily oil, Russia has a diverse industrial base, defence, agriculture etc)
3. Ties and trade with countries not participating in the sanctions (Russia trades with China, India and ME countries).
And even ignoring that: I doubt that Elon has any appetite for his satellites being targeted by nation states that have publicly demonstrated [1] [2] their capability of taking them out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
[2] https://www.spacecom.mil/Newsroom/News/Article-Display/Artic...
You seem to ask a question to push a narrative rather than by curiosity
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/imf-upgrades-chinas-2023...
~5% growth when the west is contracting, specially Germany and the US is quite the feat, what's happening in the Red Sea didn't even hurt that forecast
Have you seen the forecast for most EU countries? it's quite dark in comparison
And have you read about EU farmers protesting? Dictators must be wearing blue, and censorship may rule, perhaps not just red ;)
In the meantime:
https://consumer.huawei.com/za/community/details/Huawei-Mate...
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/China-s-own-GPS-Bei...
Economic depression? has any of the European countries attempted this?
I’m not saying China is “better.” But, like shit is pretty bad here in a lot of ways. I think it’s folly to look at them with much of a sense of superiority.
Now, Russia? Russia is real messed up… but that wasn’t the topic of conversation here. I don’t see much practical difference between BORTAC tear gassing grandmas and Hong Kong protesters getting tear gassed.
It would take far more than a bunch of cell phones to bring this about.
When people do end up on these platforms, they see a bunch of pro Russia and China stuff anyway.
Do you log into Facebook and feel the freedom right away?
FOR decades I have wanted a modern Pager - an SMS ONLY device,.
Before Android, there were a few devices that were headed there, but the hiptop made it for a while and Danger begat Android (and a $200 million dollar exit for Rubin)...
But you know what device is PERFECT for this:
HOT BUNNY 1 [0]
but modified to have a thin connection via starlink - if mods are required.
[0] https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/hot-bunny-aler...
You're package has been deliverred. Visit scam-post-gov-us.com/package19474
https://www.hackster.io/news/this-lora-messenger-is-perfect-...
It would be cool if they extended this to use satellites where LoRa is not available.
> The world's first commercial communications satellite, called Intelsat I and nicknamed "Early Bird", was launched into geosynchronous orbit on April 6, 1965.