Apple is paying a pretty penny to GlobalStar for a similar service. Though the iPhone version (which works now in the iPhone 14 and 15, though is also country-dependent) is a very low bandwidth text-based option that can take a minute or more to send and require special pointing at satellites. Starlink is claiming to be able to deliver a limited number of voice streams direct to devices, even for non-emergency.. how the delivery of that goes in actual practice remains to be seen.

Apple have basically said its free with any supporting iPhone for "the first 2 years" and then extended it a year so far (https://www.apple.com/au/newsroom/2023/11/apple-extends-emer...)

It totally makes sense as effectively a (fairly expensive) marketing expense to sell iPhones. But I have wondered how much of that limited time freebie is just legalese protection for the event they discontinue the service or something, versus some possible future where they actually tried to charge for it in some way. That seems like a PR nightmare.

I'm curious to see how that goes long term.

The cost seems to have been in the $200-$500m range, source: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/11/emergency-sos-via-sat...