Qualcomm and Iridium's satellite link-up loses signal Moves toward enabling satellite connectivity for smartphones have taken a knock with the cancellation of an agreement between chipmaker Qualcomm and satellite operator Iridium. The deal between Qualcomm and Iridium, disclosed at the CES trade show in January, was to enable satellite messaging and emergency services in Android …
"Smartphone OEMs have indicated a preference towards standards-based solutions for satellite connectivity in mobile devices. We expect to continue to collaborate with Iridium on standards-based solutions while discontinuing efforts on the proprietary solution that was introduced earlier this year"
"We didn't want to be locked into Qualcomm's non-standard proprietary crap"
It was Iridium's. Qualcomm customers are already Qualcomm customers. This is actually a feature without much lock in. The customer would be perfectly happy to buy the next phone using a different chipset and satellite constellation, as long as they can send critical text's through it. All that has happened is that next year I will probably buy an apple phone for the first time because of the "one weird feature" - I spend enough time in places where you carry an epirb or an inreach
Yes, for a tiny minority of people, this is a feature worth paying a premium for. But it is a tiny minority. Most phone OEMs probably would prefer to wait for a working standards based solution than invest any effort into integrating a solution the overwhelming majority of their customer base don’t have care about. Once the working standards based solution arrives, they do the work, and they can be reasonably confident that work won’t be hostage to a single vendor.
Once again the phone industry fails to deliver a useful feature that works today, on a complete working satellite system, in favor of vapourware and unproven standards working through currently non-existent satellite constellations.
"It was understood that this would require future handsets compatible with Release 17 of the 3GPP 5G specifications that include support for Non terrestrial Networks (NTN)"
How many years until this is built out, debugged, and reliable then?
This will be like the 4G/5G VoLTE abortion where phones are can't work on networks the manufacturer has not configured the phone for.
More than a decade it, and phones can't make 4g/5g voice calls anywhere without falling back to a 2 or 3G network which has been turned off in many places already and most places in the next few years. What a totally useless industry.
Kudos to Apple for actually doing it today-ish, but how hard is it to be the best when you competitors are shite useless oxygen thieves.
Total rubbish post... denoting >3 sigma ignorance.
Standards are what make both your phone and your subscription so cheap and what makes mobile connection affordable across the whole planet. The 3GPP has managed to have the whole industry agree on the same technologies. Maybe you want to return to the 90s in the USA with 6 competing standards? With Nextel iDEN, QUalcom's IS95, WCDMA, D-AMPS, GSM, etc? How ludicrous...
Most of Release 17 features are already implemented by the major actors actors of the industry.
IMS (VoLTE & VoNR) need some fine tuning. When QoS cannot be guaranteed, it's off.
IMS is a much more efficient user of spectrum than last century's circuit switching techniques. So, telcos have all interest to implement IMS as much as they can. Stop ranting.
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