I wish I could pay Starlink directly and have global satellite based LTE instead of having to go through a specific carrier and be limited by other carriers’ reciprocity to specific countries and bands
One space based cell plan for the whole world
One space based cell plan for the whole world
However, a Starlink mini dish can let you cheaply make calls from basically anywhere with some minor setup.
Traditional satellite phone corporations used to charge something like 8 USD/min.
But even ignoring that the contention is low in the middle of the ocean and satellites have hardware either way, driving down the market rate for calls at sea.
Calls are ~0.75 MB/minute allowing a 24/7 conversion for for a full month for 250$, or more realistically mostly sending other kinds of data and a sub cent per minute opportunity cost for using that data on calls. The actual hardware installation is relatively trivial compared to operating a boat.
So in part it’s overhead to deal with inefficiencies and in part it’s a limited customer base for a lot of hardware, but it’s also just what the market will bare.
> Starlink is normally a single hop from a home to a satellite and then down to a base station
all mesh topologies
The bandwidth, latency and stability that Starlink has is also leagues better than geosynch based solutions, for a much lower monthly price.
Even without considering the better performance, the price makes it viable now to have a internet connections in places it did not make financial sense before.
It takes a day at most if you want a simple setup.
keeping the close-by phones on 5G to ease congestion and letting the fringe sit on 3G or 4G makes sense
I think this is the biggest reason. All nation's governments will absolutely ensure, overtly or covertly, that their national regulators limit any space-based supra-national system from being able to threaten their national telephony and data carriers. Why? Preventing losing national capabilities, government revenue (taxes, licenses & other domestic carrier fees, lobbying, kickbacks, bribes, etc) and, most importantly, losing the ability to snoop at will on calls and data (at least metadata if not full-take). Even in countries where the major carriers are all based in other nations, existing towers being land-based creates jurisdiction for the government to control and tax.
While many westernized democracies like to proclaim their commitment to freedom, rule of law and individual human rights - in practice there are currently zero governments on earth free enough to not consider loss of that absolute control over citizen's private communication an existential threat. Even in places where existing laws don't currently make it illegal, as soon as technology enables it - it will certainly be made illegal (by any means necessary). I assume SpaceX is smart enough to understand this reality.
The ITU is pretty overt about how frequency allocation governance works. Absolutely no one wants a free-for-all frequency regime, for a multitude of reasons - not even SpaceX.
You may recall that Huawei 5G equipment was expunged from domestically-controlled, western infrastructure without having broken any laws, due to fears of future abuse. Your suggestion of a foreign company unilaterally, and illegally[1] imposing it's foreign-controlled, space-based phone network goes much further than whatever fears Washington had over Huawei.
1. Pretty much every country on earth with a government regulates how radio spectrum is licensed for telecommunications, not for the purposes of control as an end, but coordination and preventing interference.
Radio Free Europe has been doing something similar successfully for what, 70 years? Of course being in violation of a given country's laws is a tradeoff.
Well, how did those predictions of the future perform?
- "The Chinese government espionage campaign that has deeply penetrated more than a dozen U.S. telecommunications companies is the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history — by far,” a senior U.S. senator told The Washington Post in an interview this week."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/21/...
Because you need your customers on the ground to run their own pirate transmitter (which can be located and penalized by ground authorities), and your satellites need to receive signals from the ground - which ground authorities from first-world countries can make arbitrarily difficult, deciphering a multitude of <1W transmission from customer cellphones is kinda difficult when a modern electronic warfare radar transmitter is tracking your satellite at the same time.
There are millions of cell towers.
During a major event, cellular companies set up portable cell towers (COWs) and even these are not enough.
And a cell tower that is right next to you still pales in comparison to a single cable in bandwidth.
This is a general starlink issue, which is why I don't understand how is it economically or physically viable in crowded areas, such as cities, where the majority of human population lives.
Aren't you actually agreeing with me in actuality (in that cells are better than satellites for densely populated areas)?
Partnering with a national carrier handles the licensing aspect and if the tech pans out the economics could shift to allow them to buy national spectrum and offer direct service.
Some regulation horror: https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/space/Pages/API.aspx . Worst case you need to wait 7 years! to get your radio license
Compare this to a 4G modem / smartphone, its amazing that you don't need to file spectrum license to another country version of FCC everytime you travel. It. Just. Worked.
Its too big and power hungry to fit inside 10x20x30 cm cubesat though :( More reason to go bigger
And a single entity to decide who gets disconnected if they do not behave
I was looking into the bandwidth (apparently most important parameter in cellular service) offered but nobody is mentioning including the Starlink landing page for the service. Sure it mentioned LTE but it can be anything from 1 to 100 Mbps and LTE+ can be well into Gbps.
Here is the previous post last year on Direct to Cell by Starlink and the main complains is about the puny bandwidth [1]. But if you are outside the town in remote places or in the middle of ocean any communication albeit a few bytes is most welcome, beggars cannot choose. For most IoT services it should be adequate but if you're inside tropical jungle or Amazon forest it will not work need to climb tree for the reception to work.
[1] Starlink Direct to Cell:
Er, if you got highway, maybe? I assure you there are plenty of roads that have poor cell reception.
If they want customers all over the world, they'd need to match the cheapest offering, as it's hard to argue that the service for some reason is more expensive in the US. I tried finding the price for a US cell phone plan, I can't actually do it. AT&T is impossible to navigate and always seems to bundle a phone. Mint Mobile tries to push 3, 6 or 12 months, which isn't even legal and the plans still come in at $40 for what is a $25 plan here in Denmark (with no additional fees).
If Starlink launched a world view subscription, at competitive prices they'd immediately crash the US cell service market.
The baseband on handheld devices do not have that much power to transmit and receive from Starlink directly; and hence the partnership with MNOs. With 5G (after Google & Meta got involved, the designs took on a Cloud/Internet-heavy focus), Starlink very well might have "slices" carved out exclusive for its own use world over.
See also: Cloudflare's Zero-Trust SIM (2022), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32982697
That is exactly what this is about, direct from standard handsets to starlink satellites.
It turns out they do.
And then one day: one censorship for the whole world.
No, thank you. The availability of different providers in different jurisdictions is crucial for thwarting world to function. I speak as a person from a country with government censorship implemented.
Agreed on the potential complication if/when I'm in another country, but, well, everything can't be simple...
I'm optimistic.
I think that, once SpaceX starts launch Starlink satellites with Starship, they'll be able to increase their globally available bandwidth by a factor of 5-10x (although it might take 5 years to roll out). A lot of that bandwidth will be eaten up by existing demand. But hopefully some of it will enable novel services like global cell service through a single provider (even if it's limited to low bandwidth applications like text and voice).
We're currently talking data rates on the order of (optimistically) 5 Mbit/s for a cell with a diameter of 15 square miles, i.e. something like 0.1 Mbit/s per km^2.
In very rural areas (which is the use case!), that's infinitely better than nothing, but anywhere people live, this is effectively nothing, and there is currently no way around ground-based infrastructure.
Musk mentions this in the very first announcement of Starlink. https://youtu.be/AHeZHyOnsm4?t=191