AST Spacemobile has contracts with ATT and Verizon to do the same so just wait
I am skeptical AST will be able to really compete. SpaceX has a massive cost advantage. I hope that they will, but the engineers at SpaceX have made me a believer. If the gen 1 direct to cell sats don’t perform (it seems like they do), they’ll just launch another batch a couple weeks later. I don’t think AST will have this ability, so I hope they get it right.
After seeing this post, I went over to the ATS subreddit to see how they’re tracking the news. The denial is palpable.
I feel so, so mixed about this. It’s going to be unambiguously good for wilderness rescue and disaster response. But I like camping and hiking in remote areas in order to remove myself from the world. And I think the lack of connectivity discourages unprepared people from taking on more than they can handle in the wilderness. If the wilderness becomes fully connected, will it spoil that feeling? Will it lead to the l…
There are virtually no unconnected places in most of Europe yet wilderness is still dangerous. It is good that rescue services can help you if accident happens (and it can happen even to the adequatly prepared).
>There are virtually no unconnected places in most of Europe yet wilderness is still dangerous.
Starlink would need to license LTE spectrum in every country it operated. Much easier to work with local carriers and piggyback on their existing bandwidth.
Would they? Given the satelites are in space I would assume pirate radio loopholes apply.
Pirate radio is a lot less fun to run if you need it to be two-way.
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.
The board at Tesla is basically Elon’s buddies. There is no oversight or independence there, they do what he wants. If law was applied equality to billionaires as it does to regular people, he would be in jail for fraud.
If shareholders are happy, what business is it of yours? If they aren’t happy, they can sell the shares.
Where was this? Members of my family have three different remote cabins surrounded by trees in Montana, Idaho, and Oregon, and all work perfectly. The early days were a little more glitchy, but with the constellation they have today, you don’t even need to aim.
2023 in the Pacific Northwest. We were given the argument that tree cover was a problem quite early on in our attempted troubleshooting. The house is a waterfront property, with a clear view of sky to the east. Anyways, the suspected issue continued to evolve, and we were not able to get to the bottom of it with the support we received. Certainly, our experience could be an anomalous. But I certainly hear this happen…
It can be counterintuitive because the user terminal is shaped like the kind of satellite dish we’re mentally prepared to understand, the kind we’ve had for the last 50 years, but it’s fundamentally different. The “clear view of the sky to the east” is the source of your problems. Starlink satellites move quickly across a the sky, and the dish needs a comparatively massive 100+ degree view angle to ensure continuous contact. If you look around online you can see comical configurations with Starlink mounted on enormous poles to get them above the tree line. This issue is the #1 cause of problems we see with new installs.
I am skeptical AST will be able to really compete. SpaceX has a massive cost advantage. I hope that they will, but the engineers at SpaceX have made me a believer. If the gen 1 direct to cell sats don’t perform (it seems like they do), they’ll just launch another batch a couple weeks later. I don’t think AST will have this ability, so I hope they get it right.
After seeing this post, I went over to the ATS subreddit to see how they’re tracking the news. The denial is palpable.
Not sure if they are dead in the water or not. However, they have until July 30, 2026 to deploy half of their fleet or they lose the FCC granted frequencies. The fleet is 3232 satellites. So far they launched 2 test satellites. They contracted most of the launches to either new rockets or ones in development, like New Glenn, Ariane 6, ULA Vulcan. They actually had to contract three Falcon 9 launches to help out with…
The FCC will be lenient, they have no reason not to be unless Musk is leaning on them.
Not sure if they are dead in the water or not. However, they have until July 30, 2026 to deploy half of their fleet or they lose the FCC granted frequencies. The fleet is 3232 satellites. So far they launched 2 test satellites. They contracted most of the launches to either new rockets or ones in development, like New Glenn, Ariane 6, ULA Vulcan. They actually had to contract three Falcon 9 launches to help out with…
The quick maths indicates that to achieve this, they’d have to launch 22.5 satellites per week every week for the next 18 months until that deadline. SpaceX seems to be launching at nearly twice that rate, having launched [1565 satellites](https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/10/30/live-coverage-spacex-t....) in the first 10 months of this year.
I disagree. Starlink is indeed awesome and SpaceX deserves every bit of their success. But there will be competitors eventually, if for no other reason than foreign militaries sponsoring them. There's no inherent reason for this to be a winner takes all market. We can only hope the competitors are half as responsible as SpaceX has been about space debris risk and ensuring the satellites are not visible to the naked e…
IMO, one of the central problems is the cost of launching stuff into space. Today, SpaceX offers world leading low prices to launch satellites: $4 m / tonne[1]. But Starlink has access to launch at cost , which is $0.86 m / tonne[2]. Which is a huge advantage when launching an enormous number of satellites. One thing to keep in mind, especially for these LEO constellations: the lifetime of these satellites is 5-10 ye…
If China where to compete they also need LEO satellites that is just over China for a couple of minutes, that have to take a long round trip around the word to give a couple of minutes access again.
That’s why you need a huge constellation.
It’s either selling to the whole world or nothing. If you don’t want to go for slow GEO stationary.