Hope they take out all these North American incumbents carriers which has been ripping ppl off for years
And once all of those incumbents are gone Starlink would certainly never abuse their monopoly power.
Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service
171–180 of 219 posts
Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Emergency communications are a big deal, because they let you go places you couldn't go before without being utterly afraid. I wonder if this will change people's behavior at all. Like, I've always wondered how LEDs affected peoples perception of nature, now that there's no longer any "Really dark scary night where you need to manage an actual fire" times. 20 years ago people still lit candles a lot of the time, if t…
The funny thing is that it's just a perception change. You'll be able to message emergency services 200 miles from civilization that you need help and they still won't get to you in time. Everyone makes a big deal about emergency services with this, and I'm sure it will save some lives, but I wonder if it will actually have a significant impact. Surely we're just shifting the weakest link to emergency service respons…
Most of the emergencies I hear about are things where you probably won't die for at least a day or two, and some of these places are only a 20 minute drive from the nearest police station, just hidden behind a hill or something from the cell tower.
The most experienced people probably aren't gonna die unless something really bad happens where minutes count, but the rest of us might have issues like "Hey I followed Google maps here but nothing looks at all like the map so I'm stuck in a jail made of boulders somehow".
With navigation problems it seems pointless to try and figure out what problems are possible or likely, it's relying on spatial abilities that can't be put into words, if you're not good at that stuff you can make mistakes that seem almost impossible to mess up.
You basically feel like you've been spun on a carousel, blindfolded, and airdropped in a random place, while hallucinating, and you have no idea how any of it happened.
One should probably not go to dangerous places assuming someone will always be able to save them, but it really does seem like this would make a big difference.
On the other hand, if someone is lost, it could be because they didn't have any battery left, and if someone was unprepared and got themselves into trouble, they may well have also forgotten to bring a power bank....
Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service
#173I 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
Of course it will not. Kim, Xi, Vladimir P. and Alexandr (to use some random names) are not going to be bothered by citizens communicating freely unless it leads to near instantaneous mass revolt in which the army, the police and the security forces all move over to the other side. Otherwise they'll just kill a few hundred, thousand, ten-thousand or hundred thousand of their citizens (which they can afford to lose) to bring the rest back in line.
It would take far more than a bunch of cell phones to bring this about.
Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 don't see a need for this. It's pretty clear SpaceX's approach can scale to real voice and data service. All you need are more satellites and bigger antennas and you'll have something way better than a one way broadcast like satellite radio or something. SpaceX has launched the current constellation with Falcon 9; Starship will be able to launch much bigger satellites much faster and much cheaper. And it will work…
Only if you're with T-Mobile or with their roaming partner (in US), and same garbage elsewhere.
(Though you could argue that having a provider-agnostic but platform-dependent comms system is trading one problem for another).
Mostly my dream is to drop my cellular provider entirely. I'm living in an increasingly wifi-covered world whenever indoors and I have lots of background-updating offline content, so having some bare minimum connectivity is all I need.
Could go the other way around and go cellular-only for all connectivity, but Canadian telecoms are hell-bent on limiting cellular data to make that impossible for most.
Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service
#175I 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
Probably not, given that operating satellite communication services targeting a given country requires approval of the respective government. And even ignoring that: I doubt that Elon has any appetite for his satellites being targeted by nation states that have publicly demonstrated [1] [2] their capability of taking them out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi... [2] https://www.spaceco…
Taking out the number of sats that Starlink fields is hard, keep in mind that it will take an order of magnitude more launches to kill them off than it takes SpaceX to launch them in the first place. If you wanted to play that game long enough you'd be bankrupt, besides I'm fairly sure that other entities besides Starlink/SpaceX might have an opinion (or two) about doing that.
Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I understand the cell is about 13 km².
13km diameter.. which is about 133km².
LTE user count limits per cell is like 500 to 1.5k, and 133km^2 is on par with Liechtenstein(160km^2, 40k population), so like, 7Mbps shared among top 1 - 3.75% of Liechtensteinians? That sounds prestigious...
Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a filmmaker, and interestingly it happened before already. One example is that since cellphones became widespread, it's not very realistic for a guy to run after a girl in the third act of a rom com -- a call is now enough This isn't bad -- it drives storytelling innovation
> since cellphones became widespread, it's not very realistic for a guy to run after a girl in the third act of a rom com -- a call is now enough Seems like, if she's running away, she might not be inclined to take your call either?
She's leaving for a job in another state and he just realised he loves her
Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service
#178I 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…
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Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a filmmaker, and interestingly it happened before already. One example is that since cellphones became widespread, it's not very realistic for a guy to run after a girl in the third act of a rom com -- a call is now enough This isn't bad -- it drives storytelling innovation
>This isn't bad -- it drives storytelling innovation to me it feels like it just drives filmmakers to make more period pieces. 'the wedding singer' comes to mind.
Yes, that too
Re: Starlink Successfully Tests Space Direct to Cell Mobile Service
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost any phone will let you make an emergency call without so much as a PIN to unlock it. No active service required.
It should even work if there isn't a SIM card in the phone, though I've only personally tested it on 2G and 3G.
It's radio certification requirement for phones to be able to do so in some regions, and requirement to NOT be able in some others so it can't be used for pranks and terrorist manifest deliveries.