Starlink and T-Mobile open satellite texting test to all | Hacker News Reader

Starlink and T-Mobile open satellite texting test to all

washingtonpost.com

107 pointsbookofjoe72 comments

A very important thing about this is going to be 911 (and other emergency number) calling. Since 911 calling bypasses network locks, we'll have a world where everyone outdoors can reach help.

There’s a popular tendency to overvalue connectivity in the backcountry and undervalue the ability to avoid unnecessary risk and self-rescue. Connectivity can actually cause some people to take risks where they otherwise wouldn’t, thinking a helicopter will drop out of the sky 30 minutes after dialing 911. Many stories about rescues in the White Mountains of NH, for example, begin with a call for help with known coordinates (either by cell or PLB). The trouble comes in rallying resources from Fish & Game, State Police, volunteer groups, etc. then getting into the woods to carry out the rescue. We’re talking many hours for this. Then there’s the issue of actually reaching those coordinates and hoping they are accurate—there’s been teams bounced around multiple points through grueling terrain while they, themselves, are putting their lives at risk.

I'm more thinking of times when I've been driving through areas with spotty cell service, rather then the actual backcountry. The sort of thing where you could drive to it, but still haven no service.

I used to be a volunteer SAR member in Colorado. You are correct that it takes many, many hours in a lot of cases. Helis were almost never used, and you’d get rolled down the mountain on a “big wheel” if you couldn’t walk. This was not fun for the subject or SAR members.

Not only that, but guess who mostly has time to volunteer? Retirees.

I wish SAR had better funding, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. I would urge everyone in the backcountry to do their best to be self sufficient and make good choices.

How does one go about volunteering to do SAR?

Find a SAR team in your area, they usually have a recruiting page. SAR is not a casual volunteer commitment they tend to train a lot. The process here (alameda county ~ bay area) is take orientation class, apply, pass fitness/skills test/oral interview/background check, attend meetings and basic training, then train more while waiting for a call out. They want 6+hrs/mo to stay active. This will be different for every jurisdiction so ymmv.

I don't personally do SAR, but am getting into some adjacent things like ski patrol that have many SAR members (SPART, Ski Patrol Rescue Team), and volunteer for large event medical along many SAR members. So don't take what I'm saying as gospel.

Looks like you'd fill out https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LP6lFpUFgm5LwD48BmfEiXHqjgP... or contact https://www.alaskasar.org/membership to find out more. Usually you do training to do one or more operational capabilities. There are many kinds of SAR, these are the capabilities. There's people who take 4x4s up fire roads, winter vehicle rescue, hiking, remains retrieval and search, drone people, alpine / ski rescue, avalanche, ropes, swift water, it goes on, think of ways people can get lost or stuck.

I don't live in Alaska but in Seattle, for one of the SARs you'd mainly learn how to do search, navigation, and camping (backpacking). Once you train you basically get a text when someone's missing and you reply if you can help. You then drive to a staging area with your kit and help out.

As the sister post said, there will be a re-occuring training and likely yearly BLS / CPR certification, and simulated missions. You need to practice this stuff, and practice being organized so you're ready to go and not just asking questions when someone is actually in danger. Ski Patrol was around 80 hours of just medical training, and another 40 hours of job training, and 50 hours of training to just use the toboggan to get someone off the hill. This training also serves to weed out the non-committed people.

There's some good photos on https://www.facebook.com/KC.SPART/ of a rescue exercise, you can see the number of people involved (there are instructors) and know they're possibly several miles up from the freeway irl, sometimes doing overnight rescues. It's a lot of work to haul someone out.

> Ski Patrol was around 80 hours of just medical training, and another 40 hours of job training, and 50 hours of training to just use the toboggan to get someone off the hill. This training also serves to weed out the non-committed people.

Is that actually a valuable goal for a short-staffed organization?

It doesn't really help a short staffed organization when people don't show up or show up randomly. You'll have 15 people one day and 0 another day. If it's ski patrol that'll highly correlate to 15 people on the blue bird powder day when you need 8, and almost no one will get hurt so you only need people to open and close the hill. And 0 on the skiied out icy day when you have 5x the injurys as you have staff on the hard conditions and you don't have time for lunch or bathroom brakes.

Also do you want someone binding up your kids broken arm or dislocated shoulder who doesn't know what they're doing, then taking them down a mogul covered black that they couldn't handle themselves with their weight and the toboggans weight with no practice? edit: removed worse injuries I've seen, I think I made my point.

Also did I say it was short staffed?

The rest of the thread explicitly states that (1) SAR is badly short-staffed; and (2) they have similar training requirements. (see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42997100 )

You're presenting ski patrol as an example of how SAR operates, and the other comments seem to agree. Is it desirable to run SAR that way?

Yes. Search and rescue is not an employment agency. A search and rescue organization without the necessary training to perform search and rescue doesn't help anyone.

That might depend on whether you prefer being rescued incompetently to dying alone in the wilderness, no?

An "incompetent rescue" can end up with more than one person dead in the wilderness.

Sadly, if rescue is likely to put others in danger, I'd expect to be left to die.

a bad rescue means you need to send in 4*n personel where n is the number of rescuers + original patient.

I feel the gp is just trying to win an argument in comments and not actually understand anything.

While we were camping on a lake in the Canadian shield, my friend rolled his ankle very badly in the night. We found a tiny bit of cell signal and called for help. I was trying to imagine some dramatic helicopter rescue as the various organizations negotiated who would do the rescue. But it turned out, he was extracted by two extremely tough rangers in a CANOE.

Eh, their lives aren't at risk at the rates of actual blue collar professions like logging, roofing etc. and these jobs have lower prestige and benefits as well.

A little tax-payer funded training in the form of practice runs doesn't sound like a bad thing either.

SAR groups are often unpaid volunteers and at a minimum will be eating some of their weekend off to respond… unless those loggers are unpaid prison labor what you say is false.

Will there be 911 calling? The announcement says texting only.

I believe I've heard they will have it when more services are available. But text-to-911 seems like it could be useful.

> a world where everyone outdoors can reach help

Get a 406 MHz beacon [1]. They’re more effective in more conditions, unambiguous and easier to hone in on than phoned-in coördinates.

[1] https://www.sarsat.noaa.gov/emergency-406-beacons/

According to the sign-up page:

    Anyone on any carrier can sign up now to join the beta test and get satellite-powered messaging-at no extra cost until July. Secure your spot today.

They are signing up test users from any network, not just T-Mobile.

Which 911 center will the satellite relay calls to?

Provided, of course, that you have the special app which costs $5.99/month* and has full access to your phone storage, camera, microphone, GPS location, WiFi SSID, OAuth tokens, and copyright ownership of your childs baby pictures.

Coming soon*

https://archive.ph/PPrgQ

It's interesting to see all the criticism of things like this on a place like hacker news.

Starlink has repeatedly been pooh-poohed. It's impossible, it'll never work, no one will want to use it.

If you have ever travelled internationally the potential game changing nature of Starlink would be immediately apparent.

This is a test. If nothing else, spacex is known to iterate. Starlink satellites have intentionally low lifetimes in space, they are all going to be replaced relatively soon with later generations.

Yes, Biden and the FCC successfully fought Starlink, they got the awards for rural connectivity revoked, and the appeal of the revocation also kept the award revoked because starlink supposedly couldn't provide rural connectivity. So at least on paper starlink has "failed" to meet the needs of rural folks.

The FCC "concluded that Starlink had not shown that it was reasonably capable of fulfilling Rural Digital Opportunity Fund requirements to deploy a network of the scope, scale, and size required to serve the 642,925 model locations in 35 states for which it was the winning bidder."

You'd sort of expect hacker news folks to be interested in the science of potential benefits of this sort of thing (even if they doubt it'll ever happen). T-Mobile is betting pretty clearly that starlink WILL be able to deliver messaging via a space based backhaul.

And rumor has it that starlink is bringing in some real money even if the govt has determined its not technically feasible so there is some market validation of their ideas.

> It's impossible, it'll never work, no one will want to use it.

Of the issues I've heard tied to Starlink, none are these three.

The issues usually are: Expensive, slow, weather related connection issues, blocking sky, space junk and/or falling debri.

I'd include ethics of giving money to Musk.

The real test would be if you gave end users in the most remote areas the money directly and let them make their own decisions on how they got internet would they wait 5 years and pay for some microwave tower govt thing or go buy starlink today.

> would they wait 5 years and pay for some microwave tower govt thing or go buy starlink today

They'd probably pay to keep their electricity on for another month. Or 4 months because it's a starlink-level of cash.

They didn't get the FCC money because they couldn't get a consistent 100Mbps down 20Mbps up, not because anyone claimed it didn't provide access.

Those numbers are the current FCC definition of "broadband" and I think it's fair to use the broadband standard as the main threshold for that money. And the latency requirement is a generous 100ms, no shenanigans there. Maybe partial funding would be good for connections that can at least meet 25/3, but we shouldn't consider 25/3 to be good enough.

"Winning bidders have committed to deploy broadband to more than 5.2 million homes and small businesses in census blocks that previously lacked broadband service with minimum speeds of 25 megabits per second downstream and 3 megabits per second upstream (25/3 Mbps) as determined by FCC Form 477 data."

The change in definition to 100/20 was in March 2024. Well after the RDOF auctions.

Even ignoring that - the shenanigans are pretty clear :) The FCC claimed that starlink couldn't meet the standard because it currently does not deliver that speed. The irony though is all the competitors (who got lots MORE money) basically haven't deployed anything AT ALL, and are at 0/0 AND are very very very unlikely to ever deploy to the hardest to reach rural locations. It's all going to be games playing and cherry picking in near rural areas or crazy high build out costs.

The proof is actually in the pudding. People are chosing to pay to use Starlink and not the subsidized RDOF deployments in part because the cost per deployment is so high to very rural areas they simply are not out in all of alaska etc yet (and starlink is going to be not only in all of alaska but on most bigger boats and many planes and more).

Note the awards are pretty comical

"The CCA paper argues that funding was unfairly awarded to areas like Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco; parts of downtown Chicago; some of the largest and busiest airports in the world; and tech-heavy locations such as Apple Headquarters in Cupertino, Calif."

“This whole thing is a sham,” Settles said. “Having the 477 data is a joke, because you’re basically self-dealing to the incumbents because they influence what the information is.”

Settles added there should be more accountability on how FCC broadband money is used after it’s awarded. Billions of FCC dollars have been given out for many years. “And what do we have to show for it? I would contend that we have little to show for it,” Settles said.

A 2018 study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance indicates that Form 477 reporting enables “de facto monopoly providers” to “overstate their coverage and territory to hide the unreliable and slow nature of their service in many communities.”

I remember when they announced Starlink (and 3 or 4 competitors started angling at the space too) that I made a rough prediction that its never going to become a global internet, its a niche product for rural users that will immediately hit a ground station in the same country.

Despite consistent, vocal, misunderstanding from rusted on musk stans, this continues to be the truth.

In fact Starlink continues to obey every Carrier and Satellite related law in every country that it does business. Musk spends significant time shitting on the australian government, but he absolutely pays for his spectrum and he absolutely submits all requested information to the australian government.

Starlink's ground stations basically operate like a traditional ISP, just worse. To the point where to really get any traction its more or less a Vocus operation in Australia these days.

>Yes, Biden and the FCC successfully fought Starlink, they got the awards for rural connectivity revoked, and the appeal of the revocation also kept the award revoked because starlink supposedly couldn't provide rural connectivity. So at least on paper starlink has "failed" to meet the needs of rural folks.

This doesnt surprise me in the least. Where my customers use starlink in an area with any kind of population its a race to the exit. Where it is doing amazing is on remote cattle stations with near to no density. I have seen what passes for Rural in the USA and its positively urban by Australian standards. Where WISPs are professionalising they arent really becoming threatened by Starlink (where they suck they are getting creamed by them however)

>T-Mobile is betting pretty clearly that starlink WILL be able to deliver messaging via a space based backhaul.

T-Mobile probably has to meet Starlink at every base station in the country they are working on.

>And rumor has it that starlink is bringing in some real money even if the govt has determined its not technically feasible so there is some market validation of their ideas.

This doesnt surprise me. I have evaluated several alternative satellite internet providers, and starlink is extremely cheap in comparison. Lack of layer 2 services is a dealbreaker for some companies however, which is why I was still seeing 15k pa 20M sat services as of 2024. Theres some interesting things happening in MEO. Ironically, if Starlink ever hits multigig, we will probably see MEO services hit widespread availability of roughly 200M and the corresponding cost saving might throw starlink under the bus.

>space based backhaul.

This remains the untested claim. Much like Tesla cars becoming commonplace, Spaceship going to Mars, hyperloops etc, the actual stated goal of the company is what lies unachieved.

My rough calculations were that space based backhaul is prohibitively expensive, and doesnt benefit well from scale out of small satellites. Its all about routing density. He has a line of larger sats going up, but even then I just dont see it. Every increase in routing capacity is going to come with increases in heat and failure. The starlink constellation is good at dropping the link at the nearest ground station, its very unlikely to ever become good at sending your data to a ground station on another continent.

I was chuckling a bit at your 'just worse' comment. I do not know whether you have had any actual experience with it, but just to add a few anecdotes:

- I ordered starlink for testing even though I have Telekom DSL in a small town. Did not even install it the first day (as I had to put it up on a pole), then Telekom failed for me and lots of my neighbors. No phone, nothing. The next day I installed starlink and had Internet again at 200Mbs (faster than my DSL, albeit more expensive at first, they have since reduced price to parity).

It took 7 days for Deutsche Telekom to fix the issue. And that repeated every once in a while. I have since setup a failover with PRIMARY usage via Starlink.

- A customer of ours has Telekom and Vodafone Cable. The entire VOIP runs over Telekom , but is so slow as to be unusable (Rather big city in Germany) for that many people. They got cable as a secondary web surfing link. Number of failures over the year 2022-2023 was not funny, we had a LOT of calls to make to get this back up.

- Another customer, still big city but on the outskirts in the industrial area does not even get any good DSL at any sensible cost. He installed Starlink with us and its his primary connection for years now. Including daily and hour-long video calls.

- A school I know has had a huge number of issues with their fiber internet connection often resulting in very intermittent internet which disrupts classes etc.

So to say its always better is just not true and having some alternatives definitely dont hurt.

Tested a starlink in a depopulated outer suburb of a city and it performed worse than our government copper vdsl. Lifted that very antenna inland 400km and suddenly it was performing perfectly.

This is part of the issue. You really do need to "Suck it and see" when it comes to starlink. Is the ground station over subscribed? The Satellite? Its not like their support will tell you anything.

There's nothing wrong with having alternatives, I put my father on to starlink because his area is perfect for it. But there are cheaper alternatives in metro areas. I was slinging 2-300M 60GHz links for cheaper than starlink 6 years ago. 60GHz is getting cheaper and faster at an impressive pace. I worked on a POC in canada for 5GHz at 80MHz that was doing 150M for residential. Half the price of Starlink.

Having used Starlink a couple of times recently while travelling (think rural accommodations and the like such as rural areas of New Zealand and the Samoa islands) I've not been impressed with it. In every single case my 4G phone had better service from the local cellco (even where it was 1, bar of service) than Starlink. Don't get me wrong, Starlink is great when it is the only option. But I keep seeing it deployed in places there are other better options in including fibre, xDSL, 4G/5G, etc. It seems the hype for Starlink is very real, and lay people are sucked into thinking it's the best thing since sliced bread when it's not the only option (and actually not the best option). A great example is my current holiday accommodation is literally within 5G coverage and probably can easily get xDSL (if not fiber optic) but no, they go with Starlink... So damn shifty I gave up after a few days and now use a local LTE 4G provider instead at my own cost.

I've traveled internationally extensively. These days my phone just works. I have not traveled to Africa or South America though, so maybe we're just doing different traveling. I mention this because you say it should be obvious if you've ever traveled.

My provider is Google Fi.

Go here to sign up for the beta:

https://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/satellite-phone-service#si...

Regular price for the non-TMobile customers is $20/mo.

From the linked page:

How much will it cost?

The beta is free for all. When T-Mobile Starlink launches in July, it will be included FREE on our best plan – Go5G Next – and available on other plans for $15/month.

Until March 1st, T-Mobile beta testers not on Go5G Next can secure an Early Adopter Discount of $5 off per month, reducing the monthly cost to just $10/month.

Verizon, AT&T and other customers can get T-Mobile Starlink without switching to T-Mobile for $20/month after the beta ends in July.

With T-Mobile's history of recurring data breaches one needs to wonder whether they have an internal plan to sell all their user data periodically and then claim that they were pwned by some new vulnerability.

I'm sure I wouldn't touch any service that associated with or shared data with them. Y'all do your own thing though.

I sometimes wonder what their data collection on me would look like. I get a new starter SIM and number each month. I don't store anything in the SIM.

You get a new phone number every month? This is peak HN lol.

I do! I started because it was $17/mo for 10GB. I pay $23/mo now but I really like calling from a disposable number. I have a 2nd SIM in my phone ($30/yr) for incoming calls + backup carrier.

This seems like an unfair conspiracy theory. It’s more likely that they are just a big target with historically not enough defense.

I think their history of breaches indicates that they are slow to learn from thier mistakes made in securing their customer's PII and as a result I am obtaining my cellular service from a competitor.

Though that competitor has also suffered data breaches, moving to another service makes no logical sense to me since it seems that none of them have a deep commitment to data security since the cost of noncompliance is too low. If meaningful penalties were mandated, something that is unlikely to happen in the current anti-consumer, deregulatory environment, then it would make sense to switch to a provider that has a strong commitment. Otherwise you might as well stay with your current provider.

T-Mobile did get hit annually between 2017-2020 making it appear to a casual observer that perhaps they were just selling the data with their low prices serving as a loss leader and making up the difference by selling everything that they could scrape from customer services annually.

It's a cynical take, I know. It keeps me from switching though.

Simple solution for this is to combat it the same for all cellular carriers.

Pre-paid with false information. Cell phone company has a data breach and they data siphon has a number tied to Bob Smith born in 1924.

If I ever do get another phone or switch providers I will seriously consider a cash purchase under an assumed name.

I'm cutting my tech usage now as it is, buying things locally instead of making online purchases, paying by check or cash instead of credit card, leaving my phone home when I go anywhere, editing old posts on forums that I have used, etc. If I continue to use a cell phone when my current phone obsoletes or dies it will definitely be a minimal feature phone for calls and texts only.

I'm a bit tired of all this data hoovering and though it is certainly too late for a lot of things there is never a better time to do something different than right now.

"If you've got a nazi sitting at a table and 10 people sitting around talking to him, then you've got a table with 11 nazis."

Hand over control of nearly all my communication methods to someone as trustworthy as Musk, who has shown a willingness to ban/blacklist people from other services based on his personal feelings and ego, among his other less savory behaviors? Nah, no thanks.

Ha, have you seen YouTube censorship of anything worthy of importance?

That's just part of life. I much prefer a well known public personality with lots of problems; than an opaque council of censors at Google or Facebook.

I don't see the difference from an average user's perspective. Either will ban you arbitrarily on a whim and then ignore you. Knowing who's to blame by name isn't that big an improvement if there's no chance they unban you.

Good thing we live in a capitalistic society where this is an n+1 option rather than a socialist society where it is decreed that everyone must use starlink.

so far

T-Mobile silently drops every text from my personal numbers, thanks to The Campaign Registry, a T-Mobile led org. This is a wide reaching issue; the article does a disservice by not addressing it.

Because if T-Mobile is gatekeeping this text-over-sat route, it'll be another network that silently drops our texts.

Any evidence to the contrary would be welcome.

How is your personal issue on an unrelated topic relevant to the article? I understand you're having personal difficulties but I've never even heard of this issue and more sounds like a simple mistake that can be addressed by talking to T-Mobile.

> I've never even heard of this issue and more sounds like a simple mistake that can be addressed by talking to T-Mobile

I've had T-Mobile for too long.

It would frequently drop SMS until I purchased a new phone. The problem went away after then.

New problems came about. Not being able to log in to their website using Firefox in Private Mode, for example. Not to mention many frequent other types of privacy violations.

Too bad other carriers don't have service here. I'd drop T-Mobile in a heartbeat.

> but I've never even heard of this issue

I would expand this to say that TCR is an expensive, problematic and wide ranging issue. I accept that it is an issue you have never heard of.

What does "thanks to The Campaign Registry" mean? Why are they involved? Are those texts automated?

> What does "thanks to The Campaign Registry" mean?

It means The Campaign Registry is the full reason why my texts are silently dropped. ref:https://old.reddit.com/r/VOIP/comments/107omsg/lets_talk_abo...

> Why are they involved?

Because they can be. Ostensibly, it's a T-Mobile-led effort to reduce levels of SMS spam. It does this by forcing commercial entities to register or else their SMS are silently dropped.

In reality TCR is a system that blocks SMS traffic inappropriately and broadly.

This last bit includes traffic from telecom providers like mine (that compete with wireless carriers). TCR does this (astoundingly) by lumping smaller telecoms with mass marketers. It's the sort of anti-competitive behavior that an ethical and capable FCC would look into - eventually.

Past that, TCR is onerous, expensive and unpredictable. It puts small-biz thru big-corp-sized hoops and will endlessly reject legit applications with little recourse. Small local shops have to pay-to-play & traverse the onboarding ordeal - or else they're fully blocked from texting their customers. Period.

> Are those texts automated?

No. They're routine texts I manually send from my personal numbers. Except to T-Mobile lines.

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