Satellite phones are coming, but users not happy to pay much extra for the capability Two out of five mobile phone subscribers are unwilling to pay any extra for direct-to-cell satellite services, which may give operators pause for thought as they continue to pump cash into scaling the infrastructure. Much has been written about the race to enable satellite connectivity for mobile phones, typically to provide …
What would actually be considerably more use to me would be for the many mobile operators who currently block it to permit WiFi calling beyond their national borders (and no, VPN + turning on airplane mode is in most cases no longer sufficient). But it's all about revenue, not utility. At least in theory - the reality is that however hard telcos try to push up their revenue the price of their services seems to continue to fall.
If its a 5% uplift over your tenner then thats only the cost of a pint of beer per annum. Pretty much a rounding error in terms of overall household expenses.
But I also fail to see how that's going to recoup the billions being put into establishing and maintaining the constellations so I doubt very much it'll come in at 5%. Unless the end state is to turn off a large proportion of the terrestrial base stations. Which raises some terrifying resiliency and sovereignty questions.
I'd also much rather have dark skies than always-on YouTube and FB abso-fucking-lutely everywhere but seems like its too late for that...
Well that's it, I suppose: I bet the survey just asked as a percentage, rather than a price. If you're paying a hundred ($currency units) a month already, you might not object to a fiver or a tenner on top of that. If you're only paying a tenner to start with it's a different story. But it won't be a percentage uptick; it'll be a cash increase unrelated to your current spend.
And given that Joe Public can't calculate percentages as a rule, even the easy ones...
Whatever the increase, it's extremely unlikely to be an across the board percentage anyway. There will be a base minimum, so those on cheaper tariffs will probably pay significantly more than 5-10% of current tariff rate.
Personally, I'm in the "no, I don't to pay for it because I have to need for the extra facility" camp, like probably most people in urban areas. I do travel across large portions of the UK on a regular basis and rare are the times I ever have to go looking for a phone signal. I'd image that even in the US, a very large portion of the population will never or only ever very rarely, see a need for direct to satellite phone connections. I can see the benefits for people living in or visiting rural areas, but I think the market is vastly smaller than the telcos and sat operators think.
The other question not mentioned or apparently considered is yeah, the feature might cost a bit more, but what about the call/SMS/data charges? Dunno about the US, but it took EU legislation to get mobile roaming charges under control and down to sensible and realistic levels. I suspect sat calls will be "roaming" at astronomical charging rates :-)
I'm not very interested in satellite connectivity at all, but my interest level will change a lot depending on what I can do with it if I had it. So far, that has not been very clear. Is it that I can send an SMS if I position my phone just right? If so, that's great for emergencies, but as I'm rarely in the middle of nowhere getting into emergencies, and if I was I might bring something more powerful to resolve that situation. Is it unlimited data at speeds sufficient for me to send and receive email? Then I can do a lot more stuff outside of coverage range and would be willing to pay more.
Somehow, I think the feature set is somewhere in between these, probably closer to the first one. Without knowing what it is that they want me to buy, I can't possibly know how much I'm willing to have added to my bill to have the feature.
I'm almost never out of cell range as it is. There were some blank spots a month ago when I was on a US cross country train, but that was fine with me. I know a couple of people that have hiked to the top of Mt Whitney in California and were able to find a spot where they could get signal and blast a selfie.
If I were to get a job for The Man again, the last thing I'd want is a phone that could ring me anywhere on the planet. I'd not be safe anywhere with no place to take a holiday that's off-grid.
"If I were to get a job for The Man again, the last thing I'd want is a phone that could ring me anywhere on the planet. I'd not be safe anywhere with no place to take a holiday that's off-grid."
Helpful hint: There's a button on the side of the phone works wonders. And presumably you have a work phone and a personal phone? Either way, it's 100% in your hands.
"There's a button on the side of the phone works wonders."
Except if the boss knows you were vacationing someplace with plenty of signal such as New York or London or even Brighton and you still didn't get back to them right away.
OTOH, if you were hiking up to Machu Picchu, somehow I doubt there are any cell towers in range and you can tell stories about it being remote, a backwards foreign country (if they've never been there, how will they know), strikes, roaming not working and couldn't find a shop selling 30 day SIMS, etc.
I wouldn't want to be reachable if the company had an emergency while I was on holiday. I would have already pointed out that there was a need for some cross-training/redundancy and the exercise would drive those suggestions home. I expect that somebody with ten thumbs would have tried to "do something" which means loads of overtime to help pay for my trip when I get back.
"Except if the boss knows you were vacationing someplace with plenty of signal such as New York or London or even Brighton and you still didn't get back to them right away."
In the UK or EU, that would be illegal. If my boss ever phones me outside or working hours, let alone while on holiday, I have every legal right to not answer or to tell him to bog off!. How I react might depend on how I'm feeling at the time and why he's calling me :-)
"In the UK or EU, that would be illegal. If my boss ever phones me outside or working hours, let alone while on holiday, I have every legal right to not answer or to tell him to bog off!. How I react might depend on how I'm feeling at the time and why he's calling me :-)"
There's theory and there's practice. You'd also have to submit a statement to a tribunal and wait and wait and wait for anything to happen.
"There were some blank spots a month ago when I was on a US cross country train, but that was fine with me"
There are areas where even the train companies have trouble covering their own lines for comms purposes (eg: Dakota badlands) and had to resort to installing satphones for emergency use.
Mountaintops are usually the best place to find a signal in remote areas. It's the valleys where there are issues. When we were rolling out AMPS in the 1980s we were able to work from hilltops to cells 150 miles away at one point - predicted by computer mapping but nobody actually believed it would happen - OTOH there were areas of dead straight highway which had a bunch of large dead spots despite being covered by multiple cells - also predicted by computer mapping and not believed until tested. A 1 metre elevation change can be critical on wide plains with only a 5 degree elevation to the nearest hilltops
" When we were rolling out AMPS in the 1980s we were able to work from hilltops to cells 150 miles away at one point - predicted by computer mapping but nobody actually believed it would happen - OTOH there were areas of dead straight highway which had a bunch of large dead spots despite being covered by multiple cells"
A company I worked for in that time period was supplying the antennas and cabling for all of that. With a good high gain antenna and line-of-sight, signals can go a fair distance. The next Field day, I'm thinking of visiting another club that sets up 100 miles away on a good hilltop. Even where I am, working 20 meters gets me stations from a good portion of the hemisphere. The local club has a good facility the city lets us use that's indoors and has AC, but we could do better if we were "on the hill" in town camped out but all of that is privately owned.
I hiked to the top of Mt Washburn in Yellowstone Park this summer. Great cellphone signal as the cellphone antennas were on top of the ranger lookout station on top of the mountain. The view wasn't so good as there was a lot of smoke in the air that day.
Apple's new iPhones apparently have limited satellite support and are in use in those areas right now. https://bgr.com/tech/apples-iphone-satellite-messaging-is-literally-saving-lives-amid-north-carolina-flooding/
There are, apparently, also some Android phones which have limited satellite support. https://www.androidauthority.com/smartphone-satellite-connectivity-3295162/
Full satellite support is almost certainly going to arrive shortly. My money is on under two years. However, I suspect that the telcos aren't going to be able to charge much, if anything, for the service.
"However, I suspect that the telcos aren't going to be able to charge much, if anything, for the service."
They'll have to charge something since satellites aren't cheap. I remember when you'd only get 25 or so texts in a month or pay more, but satellite service would be much different. The reason texts were rationed (at least in the US) is due to them not being regulated. Companies could charge whatever they liked for them without having to go through a regulatory agency with hat in hand. I expect they figured out that the bandwidth is much less for text than voice calls and latency isn't a big issue.
> The reason texts were rationed (at least in the US) is due to them not being regulated.
In the early 1990s, my employees used SMS a lot for coordinating site visits
Around 1995 the telco started advertisng SMS services - and tripled the price
"Because we can" figures very heavily in Telco pricing models
They can't charge much; charging for emergency service would be _very_ unpopular, and charging for non-emergency service would be almost as bad. If they did what they did for texts and charged because they could, the situation would be as it was for texts: very few would use the service until one telco broke ranks and offered cheaper service and was rewarded by getting customers at the expense of the others. Competition is a beautiful thing.
Back in the 1990s, various local elements of Cable & Wireless were the telcos in much of the English-speaking Caribbean; Cable & Wireless (West Indies), the umbrella group for C&W in the area, was the most profitable part of C&W. Cable & Wireless (Jamaica) was the most profitable part of C&W (WI), despite massive customer abuse in pricing and availability. C&W(J) tried to charge extra for internet access. C&W (J) tried to get rival ISPs shut down, going so far as to have the CEO of one of them (N5; I was a customer...) arrested for 'trespassing upon the works of Cable & Wireless, Jamaica, Ltd' by offering Internet service. C&W (J) had five to seven-year waiting lists for a landline. C&W (J) charged exorbitant prices for cell phones and charged special rates for connecting cell phone calls to landlines; if you called a cellphone from a landline, you got an extra per minute charge, _and_ the cellphone user _also_ got the same charge. Then, some cablecos got Internet connections and offered them cheaply to cable customers. Digicel arrived from Ireland and started selling cell service. When Digicel showed, C&W (J) had 350,000 cell customers. Six months later, they had 250,000, and Digicel had 150,000. Six months after that, C&W had 150,000, and Digicel had 375,000, despite C&W literally giving cell phones away and radically revising their tariffs. Suddenly, the waiting lists were cut to 3 to 5 years, then cut again to 1 year or less. It was amazing... but the massive customer hatred generated when C&W did what they wanted to because they could ensure that the competition saw enormous growth. C&W (WI) changed their name to protect the guilty to LIME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIME_(telecommunications_company) and DiscoverFlow. C&W remains Completely Worthless.
There are alternate sources for cell service; some cablecos offer cell service, for example. Customer abuse will tend to drive customers away.
"There are, apparently, also some Android phones which have limited satellite support."
ALL 4G mobile phones have support for talking to satellites, thanks to Starlink having incorporated cellular frequency transponders - essentially they put towers on VERY high hilltops
"Apple's new iPhones apparently have limited satellite support and are in use in those areas right now. https://bgr.com/tech/apples-iphone-satellite-messaging-is-literally-saving-lives-amid-north-carolina-flooding/"
Whatever happened to balloon mounted mini-cells? Isn't this exactly the situation they were supposed to fix? Did Google dump Project Loon?
Maybe if it was like a buck per message PAYG if I was somewhere out of range and I needed to just let someone know I was going to be late, or I was safe from a hurricane I was near or something like that I'd do that once a year, probably less than that (I can't think of anytime in the last few years I wished I could have done that)
But pay monthly for something I'd almost never use? Not at any price.
I imagine the calculation is different for people who are often in remote areas where there is no cell service, but that's hardly a large percentage. I wonder how many of the people who said they would pay more are pretty much never out of range where they would be able to access satellite service (i.e. they aren't dumb enough to think it'll work when they're in a parking ramp with no service) or who just think it would be cool to tell their friends "I'm texting/calling you over a satellite" just like people paid $9.95 a minute for AirFone back when it was new just to say "I'm calling you from an airplane!"
Iridium had to charge some hefty prices to make their service work financially (after a couple bankruptcy reorgs cut down the debt) and while there would be a bigger audience at a lower price it is never going to be something the average person wants outside of emergencies.
The trouble with charging per call for emergencies is that there aren't many emergencies.
SPOT and the other emergency beacons charge $100/pa because they are very rarely used. If they only charged per-emergency they would have to charge $1000 per call to cover the same costs - and would be ripped in the media if they went after the poor victims for this.
No I think they will remain free for emergencies. It would be very difficult for a company like Apple, Google or Samsung to say "if you have the sort of emergency that requires calling 911, we're going to charge you". They've already got the infrastructure set up (well, Apple does) and if they have enough of it to now allow non emergency messaging (free for now, someday they'll start charging for it) that's a cheap thing to add as a freebie for iPhone owners.
I'm talking about charging for non emergency - sending a message to a person rather than to 911.
The problem is that if they don't have customers willing to pay for regular satellite access so they are paying for all those satellites just for the free 911 calls.
Apple could do that because they paid a relatively small amount to Inmarsat just for the 911 calls and got a huge amount of press for "Wow the new iPhone is so advanced it can talk to satellites" it was just advertising spend
Apple has purchased multiple new satellites, so it isn't a "relatively small amount". I'm sure they figured that it would partly be offset by all the free press from being the first to offer emergency satellite on a phone (i.e. all the rescues in the news after it came out)
They'd also know that their customer base is more affluent than that of other OEMs or carriers, so they'll have the best chance of having enough customers willing to pay for non emergency messaging. Not only that, all the customers they sign up are customers who will NOT pay for it with their carrier, making it harder for the carriers to operate competitive plans.
"I'm talking about charging for non emergency - sending a message to a person rather than to 911."
The money for a subsidized emergency service has to come from somewhere. In Apple's case, it's advertising although they've been known to drop things or start charging after the new-shiny has worn off. When free mac.com email addresses came out, mine was F---microsoft@. It was funny and I didn't really use it for much except to give out to my BBS friends. After a while, Apple discontinued those and went to a paid service which morphed into something else and now I'm surprised I remembered all of that. Moral of the story: If it starts costing Apple real money and they aren't being praised constantly for having it, say goodbye.
"I imagine the calculation is different for people who are often in remote areas where there is no cell service, but that's hardly a large percentage. "
That's the issue with sat to phone and Starlink as well (even though there has been satellite internet for ages). It's not completely useless, but the number of people it serves that have no other option is quite small for the amount of infrastructure required. Very expensive infrastructure at that. It's been pointed out that, for the most part, the places where there's a high enough density of people to pay for cell/internet service already have at least one option. Paying for it is key. While there are many places in the world with lots of densely packed people, most of them don't have a populace that can afford anything more than the most basic of phone service. I suppose one needs to create a map of monetary density. What winds up being left is service that most people with the money will rarely use and won't pay to keep maintained since they are already well provisioned without it.
In UK you can buy personal locator beacons for alerting emergency services. Expensive to buy, but no subscription cost.
Useful if you are out and about in areas with poor phone signal (waves at swathes of Scotland), or at sea, and will work when wet unlike many a phone!
.. Only to be used in a proper emergency though!!
If I'm hiking the Peak District or the highlands of north west Scotland, the ability to send an emergency message via satellite is very useful. Rather than pay a subscription for such a service, I would prefer to pay per message. I have a DeLorme InReach in a drawer which hasn't needed to be used in more than 10 years.
For those who live outside mobile/cell network coverage, it would probably be more effective to have a StarLink setup.
Starlink + whatsapp or teams or skype or whatever works for me and not sniff of a mobile signal, so no junk calls or texts which I what I get when I return to "civilisation." All I can see is that mobile comps want you to pay for direct to cell so they can spam you.
My telco here in NZ is going with Starlink to initially offer TXT coverage "on eligible mobile plans and compatible phones". Vague on exact details, but realistically TXT transmission is tiny in data terms, and the phones will only switch to Sat connection when they loose terrestrial coverage. Although there a large geographic areas that lack coverage, there's also hardly anyone in those areas. So 99% of TXTs are still going to go through the land based network. They claim voice and data will be available in the future, but no specifics on costs there. Possibly you will need to be on a more expensive plan for that feature?
Previous comment stated that it's going to cost billion for the satellites. 100% agree, but I think the plan is to get a billion folks to chip in $1 a month extra. Pretty soon you have got those billions of dollars. Starlink doesn't just serve the US now, so the cost is being spread across every country they are active in, and that's a LOT of people paying their ~$100 a month, and the individual Sats are in use (and earning income) for most of their orbit, not just when they happen to be over the US.
The rush to offer a satellite service is only because the legacy telcos know that Elon is going to release a phone.
With Starlink in place Elon has the ability to release the X Phone with the carrier subscription included.
When you look at the size of the iPhone and Galaxy revenue it’s too tempting not to go after that market.
Well, he might sell one, but would people buy it?
I don't see why they would, given that you can already buy phones with satellite calling capability made by companies who know how to make phones well. Those phones also *don't* come with X pre-installed, which a lot of people would see as a feature nowadays....
Yeah like I trust a "poll" on X to be honest rather than to say what Elon wants it to say, or for for him to deliver on what he promises and more important WHEN he promises something he is terrible at! Especially promises on privacy - I could EASILY see him promising that and then backtracking when the company is flailing and needs more revenue. Or just to increase his net worth if he sees someone else catching up with him.
The WHOLE CONCEPT of the "everything app" he dreams of X becoming is founded on collecting personal information and using it across all the services the app provides. He may promise "privacy" as "we won't sell your information to a third party" but Google can promise that too - they don't actually sell your personal information they just leverage it to deliver you ads from third parties and keep a massive database on you. I trust Musk would do the same if his everything app was ever realized.
The problem is the market for phones that work outside of cellular coverage areas is pretty small. There are people who live/work in remote areas who would love to have it, but for most of us the times we lack cellular coverage are times when satellite would not work either - i.e. indoors or the cells are overloaded from too many people in one place. People aren't going to compromise on the features of their iPhone or Samsung to get some low quality generic Android slab that's only claim to fame is using Starlink when you're out of cell range.
He's going to have bigger problems soon. More and more people who have been long established on Twitter are mirroring their postings to Threads. Next time he opens his mouth and spiels Nazi drivel instead of just talking about leaving, a lot of people will leave. His extremism might turn Twitter into Gab next time, as if you see a lot of people leave the signal to nazi ratio gets worse then pretty soon everyone who don't want to be associated with that will pull up stakes.
Dumping them for something that only works outdoors and won't work in your car? That may be a cost saving but hardly desirable for customers. They'd flee a carrier who did that for one who didn't.
There's incentive to expand towers in rural areas as that's the best way to deliver high speed internet to places to remote to run fiber to.
"There are a LOT of rural towers which have 1-2 phones using them per day, whilst being expensive to maintain"
You'd need to show some stats and also whether those towers were subsidized or not. Some of them might be political in they had to be installed for the entity to be allowed to place towers on other places. Those out of the way towers won't be particularly up to date and capable of handling too much traffic. There can also be other uses that cover the costs such as telemetry or emergency services. How long that infrastructure stays up might depend on a lot of things aside from how much traffic they see.
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