181–190 of 219 posts
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.
Do any of the 4G/5G protocols accommodate satellite-based comms with some sort of special transmit mode from the phone side? It blows my mind that any of this is possible, because I was a futurist as a kid, but completely dismissed off-the-shelf cell-to-sat as sci-fi only.
Well, given that it is pretty much always line-of-sight it has (relatively) low power requirements compared to the distance involved, from you to the satellite you will mostly have to deal with attenuation by water vapor. Also: satellite can do beam steering through phasing shifting multiple antennas without any moving parts. So once a satellite knows you exist it can further reduce the power requirements by focusing…
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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…
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Well, given that it is pretty much always line-of-sight it has (relatively) low power requirements compared to the distance involved, from you to the satellite you will mostly have to deal with attenuation by water vapor. Also: satellite can do beam steering through phasing shifting multiple antennas without any moving parts. So once a satellite knows you exist it can further reduce the power requirements by focusing…
Do the satellite-side phased arraying work that quickly to go to the per-customer level? I figured it would just be used to account for the spinning and moving nature of the satellite.
https://erkansaka.net/2023/10/03/a-video-how-does-starlink-s...
Of course the gain wouldn't be as nice as when both sides can do the phased array trick but cell phones don't have the same kind of antenna capabilities that Starlink's dish has.
This is the relevant bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs2QcycggWU&t=1265s
I suspect the reason it is text service and not voice is that the phone antenna constraint results in severe bandwidth limitations. And with all that tech working for them I still think it is a small miracle they got this to work.
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 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…
Ironically, the best experience would be messaging between an iOS and an Android device.
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Is the baseband firmware not updatable?
Manufacturers have no incentive to update it with new features. Their incentive is to require you to buy a new phone to get those features even if the old hardware could theoretically support it.
Especially when they are making money continually the whole time by selling everyone's data, even if you could keep the same phone for 20 years.
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Manufacturers have no incentive to update it with new features. Their incentive is to require you to buy a new phone to get those features even if the old hardware could theoretically support it.
Google seems to be pretty happy to provide updates. If my phone lasts 8 years I'll be even more likely to buy another Pixel after that time. Especially when they are making money continually the whole time by selling everyone's data, even if you could keep the same phone for 20 years.
I know Google is pretty good about fixing security vulnerabilities in the Pixel's baseband, as well as providing Android updates for quite a while, but baseband feature updates seem like a different category still.
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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 Go…
If it was a few months later, an iPhone likely would had saved it. It was never reported in the news.
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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...