Satellite phone service could soon become the norm Convergence between mobile networks and satellite services is becoming the norm rather than a niche strategy: a full 91 telecoms operators worldwide are now signed up to agreements with satellite providers. sat phone coverage map According to a report from mobile industry analyst GSMA Intelligence, the mobile-satellite …
'Twas ever thus.
What amazes me is that with all the advances in technology of the last 30 years, cellphone call quality and reliability has remained roughly static. I know the telcos have scaled from thousands to tens of millions of customers in that time yada yada, but for me as a user, the experience was average-to-shit then and it's average-to-shit now.
Call quality hasn't been good since the analog cell towers were shut down. Sure, they had other problems (the biggest being that every call was available for anybody to listen to) but voice quality was excellent.
It didn't need to be this horrible. At this point, the bandwidth to improve call quality immensely would be negligible. But it doesn't happen.
(Oh, and is it just me, or has latency gotten worse in the past few years? I find myself talking over people more often now than I ever have, and I keep thinking maybe we should start saying "OVER" after we finish speaking.)
Call quality hasn't been good since the analog cell towers were shut down. Sure, they had other problems (the biggest being that every call was available for anybody to listen to) but voice quality was excellent.
I did both mobile and cell-site radio HW design (including audio chains) during the analog era, and we thought audio quality was important back then. The requirement was to be as good as local landline calls, but the goal was to be even better than landline. That attitude vanished quickly when the switch to digital happened. The new attitude was "if we squeeze the bit bit rate for the codecs down a bit lower, we can support a few more calls". People will put up with it, because the competition is doing the same. So the race to the bottom began. And continues...
So the race to the bottom began.
Cell companies are pushing to make themselves irrelevant in the name of cheaper networks. Moving to voip where everything is just data means anyone who can provide Internet access is a network competitor. Cell companies looked at it as simplifying their technologies, and offloading traffic by piggybacking on their customers' WiFi.
With satellite networks I don't see how the large providers become anything more than glorified MVNOs. That is sure to cut into their profits. And if they have to compete on customer service......
The next step will be taking all the terrestrial bandwidth that has been carved out for cellular over the last decade and reallocating it to to satellite. Maybe they can survive another couple decades on the proceeds of selling their spectrum.
Yes, "if the network gives you HD." Here in the US, even those who live in the big cities aren't guaranteed HD, and it just get worse in smaller communities and rural areas. The telcos here are always crowing about 5D, but outside the cities it's either unavailable or no better than 4D; and when it comes to internet, I'm hoping I'll live long enough to see fibre where I live; my satellite connection is expensive, slow, and subject to bad weather.
Call quality is very good on VoLTE and VoNR. Of course you need a phone that has proper support for it. If you're using a cheap Chinese region phone outside of China, it's going to drop to 2G/3G for calls and sound bad
1G/2G/EDGE/3G is essentially gone in the US except for a few towers here and there. Even the bandwidth split between LTE and 5G is shifting towards 5G. Gotta have a modern phone to have good cellular.
The one thing that would really boost performance would be if telcos opened up their cells to everyone. GoogleFI kind of did this but it's hard to trust a Google project. Sharing makes even more sense with scarce satellites.
normally the problem is the User agent (UE) as with so much of networking it depends on the Equipment...
there is QoS applied and you will see this most often when someone is making a call in a train and the rest of the phones trying to consume plain data get bumped down for QoS reasons
the easiest way to get decent calls is to use a mobile/GSM handset that the operator has optimised for which in most of the world in a iPhone... and the best way in modern network is to use a iphone thats 5G capable so the latency can be reduced (if the operator has done their homework)
what you need is decent microphones/speakers and DSP paired with a good packet processing.
when we get standalone networks and full end to end packets then picking the fidelity of the sound wave will be possible right now its up to manufacturers and operators....
No, they are talking about extending reception in places where previously you had none. They aren't going to be routing any calls over satellite, the satellites will be just between your phone and the satellite when you are out of range of the towers.
This looks like a sort of reply to the Elon Musk market intrusion with Starlink.
For the majority of dense populated areas this adds little to the menu. 5G, 4G, WiFi, fiber, all present there. But I guess it is not those places that are targeted here.
Interesting areas are those with little to no such technologies. If there is a market with potential here, than this makes sense. To have an alternative to the Empire of hiss Muskiness.
But I wonder how many more satelites are needed, apart from those 12.000 Chinese.....
Yep, a real mess in LEO would seem to be on the cards.
Does anybody remember the number of LEO satellites that was supposed to make space inaccessable due to debris from LEO satellite collisions unless their orbits and orbital positioning were centrally monitored and controlled? I have a feeling that this sort of Satellite Armageddon was predicted, and more than once too, to become probable once the LEO satellite population reaches the size of the combined SpaceX and Chinese swarms, the plot being that with enough satellites in LEO, any collision will produce and scatter fragments will in turn produce a further series of collisions and still mure fragments.
Ian McLeod pointed out, in his Fall Revolution books, written in the late 1990s, that the resulting swarm of satellite fragments was likely to make space travel, as well as the operation of LEO satellites, impossible for a century or two.
Kessler syndrome isn't a pressing issue at the sort of altitudes used by Starlink et al.. Remember, they need active thrust just to stay in orbit; smash them up and the drag is suddenly hugely magnified and orbital mechanics/conservation of momentum means that nothing will be flung up to a higher circular orbit (at most, a portion of the debris will gain a higher apoapsis, with Oberth rapidly curtailing this). Think of it like a bag of densely packed feathers vs. all those individual feathers flying through the air separately.
I have seen lots of satellite connection mechanisms and two things unite them all:
1. They take a lot of power.
2. They are so expensive, even to use a small amount of it, that they're not worth buying unless you use them a lot or need them to make a lot of money.
I doubt that these LEO satellites, cheaper though they may be, will change either. If people are charged per SMS message, they're likely not to send any unless it's a major emergency. Businesses that need satellite connections have already found many services, and they may adopt these as well, but there is not as much room in that market to expand. The individual consumer market won't buy if the price is too high. My guess is that LEO from phones won't end up being affordable to the average consumer, and someone will eventually notice how unsuccessful the thing will be.
We'll have to see what the pricing is, but Apple is extending the current emergency only satellite communication they've had the last couple yars to allow non-emergency SMS and iMessage (text/emoji only) so no calls, no pictures, no app data to iOS 18 on supported phones (iPhone 14 and newer) and making it free for two years after purchase. That's regardless of carrier, Apple has its own satellite agreement with Globalstar and funded their launch of a couple dozen new satellites. After the two years are up though, who knows. But I think Apple doing that will put pressure on carriers to provide at least minimal service for free, at least in the US, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.
All I know is that if carriers intend to charge for this (except maybe in premium plans) they will HAVE to make it so customers can disable it. I'd be mighty annoyed if I tried to send a text in an area of weak reception, and had it fall back to the carrier's satellite instead of Apple's to send it, and have the carrier "helpfully" activate the $20/month satellite communication add-on for me. Because you know that's exactly what the carriers will want to do!
The satellites are using different frequencies, so there is no worry about pointing it at a tower instead of a satellite.
The reason you have to point the phone in the direction the phone indicates is because the signal from a phone to a satellite in orbit is very weak. Not sure if that changes at all with the new satellites Apple funded (i.e. if they have higher gain antennas) but going to a satellite 500 miles up (in the case of those, Starlink's are at multiple elevations) from a handheld device without an external antenna is not going to be as automatic as people are used to with cell towers.
The iPhone has the orbits programmed into it, so it knows where every one of those satellites is at any moment so it knows where you'd need to point the phone.
Not sure how carriers will handle that, there is some carrier specific data installed on phones when you install a SIM/eSIM but I don't know if that would be usable for this, if not I don't know how they plan that to work. For those whose carrier is using Starlink it may not matter since the sky is lousy with those things - except that now that I think about it IIRC only the larger v2 Starlinks can do 5G to the ground so those may be pretty limited in number at the moment.
"satellite connectivity looks like it will become just another part of mobile comms, although it isn't clear if this will be included in a customer's service plan or marketed as an add-on extra"
Add-on extra, I should think. That will limit the number of users while they iron out the bugs and get more birds to orbit, and provide a new means of parting the customer from lots of their hard earned cash.
As the service matures, it will become mainstream and be folded into the regular service plan.
The problem is, there has to be a way for you to know if you're using it. If you try to send a text in a weak area today, your phone might try a minute or two then you get an error message that it was unable to send it. If it automatically tries the satellite next, and then charges you, that's going to upset a lot of people.
Apple was smart to start out with their service being emergency only - that reduced the number of messages to allow them to get the new satellites launched and any bugs worked out before announcing their expansion of it for non-emergency messaging. With the way the carriers compete with each other for customers I can't imagine them holding back so I imagine there will be some degree of chaos when they finally launch this because they'll all be in a hurry to be first so they can advertise themselves as "the only carrier with 100% coverage of the entire United States!" (with some fine print showing up on the screen for a split second with tons of disclaimers, no doubt)
Certainly with Apple, it takes quite a bit of effort to line up the phone correctly to send a satellite message. It is most definitely not something you will do by accident, or, probably even willingly unless it is really important, like the life or death situation of an emergency message.
Well I wonder how much of that is the older Globalstar satellites that were being used when Apple first launched the SOS service, and how much that might change with the new satellites Apple funded. Technology improves over the years, they can use higher gain antennas, maybe they orbit a bit lower, etc.
Starlink's service might be a bit more automatic, simply due to how many satellites they have so there is more likely to be one that matches the orientation of your phone, unless there are trees or whatever in the way.
It gets worse. Motorola have sold off the Defy device, support and subscription components; the Defy won't be made any more but will be supported, and a new company has taken over the subscriptions.
From April 3rd 2024, the following price plans will be immediately available to all NEW subscribers with others to follow:
-£4.99/ month – SOS only
- £9.99/ month – SOS and 80 messages/ month
- £29.99/ month – SOS and 300 messages/ month
Or £59.00/ year for 250 messages/ year. You can add another 250 messages for same price if you use all these.
Minimum subscription period of 1 year (unlike the Motorola days, which were pay-per-month).
I like the idea of having satellites as a fallback for voice calls in remote areas, which in the US seem to start just outside the suburbs. But, as a replacement to cells for the services that providers are required to provide, I don't see it getting much traction. You can do the maths for the kind of power devices would need to maintain even say 2Mbit/s.
I don't care about calls or texts, but I will happily take a Starlink alternative.
Purely because I don't want to give the man a penny of my money (ironically, I have a solar setup, and am looking at EVs, and I discount any product with which he has involvement).
But I don't see that making it "work" with/like 5G is really gaining anything, it'll be obsolete in a couple of year's time and they'll barely have the satellites in place by then.
But I would happily part with Starlink-money for any non-Starlink equivalent service, just for basic Internet (which gets me Wifi calling anyway, so who cares about the rest?).
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