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Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

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Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#151

Post by Aloha »

lxgr wrote: post #83
modeless wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that Apple's capability is similar. The feature only allows texting emergency services, requires holding the phone in a specific orientation to send or receive, is separate from your carrier service (only two years are free with purchase), and is exceedingly slow. SpaceX's service will allow texting and receiving texts from anyone using your carrier number, plans to support third party messaging apps such…

Elon has mentioned a speed of about 7 Mbit/s for an entire cell (which in these systems usually means a circle with a radius of a few hundred kilometers). That's within an order of magnitude of current LEO systems. 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 band…

I think that probably works out to a single LTE carrier per spot, which is kinda brilliant, because then you only need to allocate a tiny amount of spectrum for this.

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#152

Post by xen2xen1 »

paxys wrote: post #108
14 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just thinking the other day what is Hollywood going to do in the future with people lost movies that simply won’t be very reasonable for in most movies. For example I saw one the other day and they crashed a plane but people survived and they were trying to hold their phones up but couldn’t get a signal. Of course not or there would be no plot to the show they would just be rescued right away. With this new tec…

Filmmakers still haven't come to terms with the fact that everyone has a cellphone in their pocket now and most plot confusion that normally drags on for 2 hours can be resolved in under 30 seconds.

Watched Die Hard again, and it was funny how fast a single cell phone would have changed the movie.

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#153

Post by callalex »

miki123211 wrote: post #48

I think the advent of Chat GPT makes this announcement that much more significant. 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 mi…

The last thing I need when lost in the wilderness is made up hallucinated advice.

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#154

Post by Scoundreller »

lxgr wrote: post #120
modeless wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple hasn't disclosed the bitrate of their Emergency SOS feature but from FCC filings I believe it uses Globalstar's L-Band at 1610 Mhz for uplink, and I believe the bitrate Globalstar supports in that channel is 9.6 kbps. So almost three orders of magnitude less than the SpaceX system, not one. In addition I believe that the typical achieved bitrate is even less than that in Apple's case due to the lack of a large…

The 7 Mbit/s are for an entire cell, i.e. all devices simultaneously transmitting in it, not per device. 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…

I hope one day Apple can jam some more features in the downstream. Would be cool to broadcast news or weather updates just by pointing your phone at the sky for a few moments. Satellite should be able to blast the signal.

Downsides: no real "cell" infra for Globalstar, and it doesn't work far outside of landmasses.

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#155

Post by mynameisnoone »

tjohns wrote: post #137
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.

Texting 911 via satellite usually involves a relay through a private monitoring company (like GEOS), who then places a voice call to local emergency departments on your behalf to activate SAR. 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 expensiv…

Heck, I've been in places in California where E911 didn't work. One time, the 911 operator didn't have position information despite being then on Verizon with an iPhone. Verizon followed up that everything about their system worked, but it's that N municipal 911 operation centers must be correctly configured and tested to be interoperable x M carriers x P phones. My conclusion is there appears to be no effective oversight over all American 911 operation centers to ensure they continuously meet a minimum set of standards.

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#156

Post by mcculley »

xen2xen1 wrote: post #152
paxys wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Filmmakers still haven't come to terms with the fact that everyone has a cellphone in their pocket now and most plot confusion that normally drags on for 2 hours can be resolved in under 30 seconds.

Watched Die Hard again, and it was funny how fast a single cell phone would have changed the movie.

I seem to remember that the limo driver in the parking garage had one.

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#158

Post by lxgr »

Scoundreller wrote: post #154
lxgr wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 7 Mbit/s are for an entire cell, i.e. all devices simultaneously transmitting in it, not per device. 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…

I hope one day Apple can jam some more features in the downstream. Would be cool to broadcast news or weather updates just by pointing your phone at the sky for a few moments. Satellite should be able to blast the signal. Downsides: no real "cell" infra for Globalstar, and it doesn't work far outside of landmasses.

I'm fairly certain Apple has bigger plans for Globalstar than "only" emergency SOS. They've spent considerable resources securing 85% of the total capacity already!

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:

https://www.globalstar.com/en-us/coverage-maps

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#159

Post by miki123211 »

callalex wrote: post #153
miki123211 wrote: post #48

I think the advent of Chat GPT makes this announcement that much more significant. 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 mi…

The last thing I need when lost in the wilderness is made up hallucinated advice.

This is why the "LLM with Google search" aspect is important. For hallucinated made up advice, your phone can run Llama.cpp, Chat GPT can search for a page, summarize it and draw conclusions from the page only.

Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service

#160

Post by mynameisnoone »

tuatoru wrote: post #85
dave78 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are huge portions of the USA that have no cell coverage. Often the kinds of places that people go to hike and explore - and also places that people sometimes get injured. I'm sure that's true in many other countries as well. I know people who volunteer for search & rescue teams, and they all universally believe that this kind of thing definitely will save lives. The smart thing to do if you were going somewhere…

> The smart thing to do if you were going somewhere remote would be to have a 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_...

Yep. 2 is 1, 1 is none. If you're going to the middle of nowhere[0] or routinely transit areas with spotty coverage, are you really going to trust a brand-new feature of a $1399 USD iPhone and not also have a ~$370 PLB as a backup? It defies common sense that such a feature would permit the omission of a survival mindset.

0. https://remotefootprints.org/project-remote/remote-spot-rank...

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