The American aerospace manufacturing and space transportation services company SpaceX showed the first text messages sent between T-Mobile phones via one of the low-Earth orbit satellites of Starlink, the satellite internet service developed by the aforementioned company, technology media reported Ars Tecnica.
“On Monday, January 8, the Starlink team successfully sent and received our first text messages using T-Mobile network spectrum through one of our new Direct to Cell satellites launched six days earlier,” a Starlink update detailed.
SpaceX last week launched the first six Starlink satellites capable of providing cellular transmissions to standard LTE (4G-capable) phones. Service from what Starlink calls “cell towers in space” is expected to provide text messaging this year for T-Mobile customers in the United States and for operators in other countries. Voice and data service is expected to begin in 2025.
SpaceX posted a photo of the two iPhones exchanging text messages such as: “What a sign” and “So wow.” The process that allowed these text messages to be sent was quite complicated, Starlink said.
“Connecting mobile phones to satellites presents several important challenges to overcome,” the company noted. “For example, in terrestrial networks cell phone towers are fixed, but in a satellite network they move at tens of thousands of miles per hour relative to users on Earth. This requires seamless transfers between satellites and adaptations to factors such as Doppler shift and time delays.
Cell phones have “low antenna gain and low transmit power,” making it “incredibly difficult” to communicate with satellites hundreds of kilometers away, the company said. But Starlink’s new satellites “feature innovative custom silicon, phased antennas, and advanced software algorithms that overcome these challenges and provide standard LTE service to cell phones on the ground.”
Satellite phone service should work almost anywhere on the planet, but it wouldn’t make sense to use it when you can connect to a terrestrial cell tower. As SpaceX CEO Elon Musk noted, the limited bandwidth means it is “not significantly competitive with existing terrestrial cellular networks.”
T-Mobile said last week that field tests of Starlink satellites with the T-Mobile network will begin soon, but did not announce a start date for actual service. T-Mobile said Starlink connectivity will be useful in areas of the United States where there is no coverage “due to terrain limitations, land use restrictions” and other factors.
While this technology could benefit many nations with limited mobile coverage, its use is still limited in some. According to the media Economic time, The launch of satellite broadband services in India awaits regulatory approvals.
In March 2022, Cuban-American Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar made a personal appeal to Musk to bring Starlink satellite Internet technology to Cuba, as it did in Ukraine. The billionaire businessman sent Starlink to Ukraine in response to a public request from Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov following ongoing internet outages during the Russian invasion. Salazar’s request was aimed at countering the frequent Internet cuts that the Cuban regime makes during popular protests or events that it is interested in silencing.
2024-01-14 16:47:00
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