Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

ispreview.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 219 posts

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#51

Post by bdcravens »

heywoods wrote: post #19
berserk1010 wrote: post #11

I wonder if this service will facilitate collapse of censorship in dictatorship countries like China and Russia. Especially if those countries are currently suffering from economic depression like China and Russia, and its citizens are waking up to its harsh realities and are keen to get unfiltered information

If you are a country like China that wants to prevent this from being possible how would they go about it? Can these satellites provide communication between phones without a terrestrial cell network sitting in the middle?

Unless Elon offers it for free, they'd start at the bank level, blocking payments. Then they would put pressure on Elon, putting Tesla's ability to sell there at risk. That's before they do anything from a technology standpoint.

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#52

Post by modeless »

mardifoufs wrote: post #39
DenisM wrote: post #4

Skimming the article I couldn’t find which phone models they tested with. Any ideas?

Probably not Androids. I don't think any android supports sat comm right now especially after Qualcomm abandoned it's chip/radio effort so it's not included in most common SoCs.

The point of this service is it works with unmodified existing LTE phones. "supports sat comm" is not a requirement.

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#53

Post by mardifoufs »

modeless wrote: post #52
mardifoufs wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not Androids. I don't think any android supports sat comm right now especially after Qualcomm abandoned it's chip/radio effort so it's not included in most common SoCs.

The point of this service is it works with unmodified existing LTE phones. "supports sat comm" is not a requirement.

Ahhh I misread the article then! And Woah ok, I genuinely didn't think that would be possible without phased arrays like starlink uses for its normal service. Amazing!

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#54

Post by vinniepukh »

mardifoufs wrote: post #39
DenisM wrote: post #4

Skimming the article I couldn’t find which phone models they tested with. Any ideas?

Probably not Androids. I don't think any android supports sat comm right now especially after Qualcomm abandoned it's chip/radio effort so it's not included in most common SoCs.

Starlink’s direct to cell service works with regular 4G LTE radios

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#55

Post by Vicinity9635 »

berserk1010 wrote: post #11

I wonder if this service will facilitate collapse of censorship in dictatorship countries like China and Russia. Especially if those countries are currently suffering from economic depression like China and Russia, and its citizens are waking up to its harsh realities and are keen to get unfiltered information

[dead]

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#56

Post by philistine »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #15

I feel like this will eventually kill dedicated sat phones, which are (a) horribly expensive, both for the gear and subscription plans, and (b) still not very reliable. 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.

Never bet against the cell phone.

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!

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#57

Post by qup »

nwatson wrote: post #44
oskarkk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone can run out of battery and it can be easily destroyed or lost.

Your credit card expired and you didn't pay your last month of service and to update your credit card details you need access to your email account to confirm ID you but your phone is a new replacement phone and you don't have your 2FA codes for your email account.

Almost any phone will let you make an emergency call without so much as a PIN to unlock it. No active service required.

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#58

Post by ericcumbee »

14 wrote: post #26
modeless wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you would need service with one of the partners to get roaming on all of them. Although on terrestrial networks in the US at least 911 service is supposed to work even on phones without any carrier plan. Maybe they can eventually work it out so that texting emergency services works on any phone anywhere globally even without service. That would be a great achievement for humanity.

Yes it would be a fantastic achievement. I was saying in another comment what is your he movie industry going to do when there is no such thing as no service, a common theme used in almost every scary movie?

Dead battery

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#59

Post by drak0n1c »

alterego2 wrote: post #41
berserk1010 wrote: post #11

I wonder if this service will facilitate collapse of censorship in dictatorship countries like China and Russia. Especially if those countries are currently suffering from economic depression like China and Russia, and its citizens are waking up to its harsh realities and are keen to get unfiltered information

It will not. 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 modicu…

Linguistic and cultural barriers are far stronger than informational barriers. Which may be an upside considering how other potentially self-destructive fads and attitudes spread so rapidly with the internet. We've seen the beginnings of that with the Arab Spring, and various culture wars across English-speaking western countries. If the world were even more homogenous the whiplash from such polarizing movements would be even more severe.

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#60

Post by notatoad »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #42
modeless wrote: post #5

I don't know if this has been announced before: "Operators in our network have access to reciprocal global access that allows their users to access the service when they travel to one of our partner countries." [1] 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 tex…

> I don't know if this has been announced before... 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…

>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.

Post reply on HN