But low-bandwidth text is all I need. I guess I won't be renewing my subscription for my InReach Mini forever (although that form factor is pretty nice).
I don't need to be able to stream Netflix when I'm in the backcountry, it's just that my wife insists I need to be able to get a helicopter if I break my leg.
Now we need app developers to log off their fiber-served wifi when writing messenger apps, and log into a high-latency, low-bandwidth, high-packet-loss network instead so Messages will actually open instead of whatever it's trying to do to upload my location history and download contact pictures...
> I won't be renewing my subscription for my InReach Mini forever (although that form factor is pretty nice)
Before getting an InReach, confirm a 406MHz emergency beacon doesn't fit your bill [1][2]. (I have this one [3].)
You can't text a loved one. But with no subscription, a years-long battery and powerful radio that works around the world, you can call emergency services to your precise location.
My wife hikes in Western Colorado quite a bit and has helped rescue 3 parties over the past 4 years. In one case, a young woman (an ER nurse) was in dire distress for no apparent reason and fading quickly (in retrospect possibly COVID related sequela). Initially, emergency responders were going the route of a land-based rescue, but the Mini allowed the urgency to be communicated more clearly. The helicopter touched down on a scree field (but couldn't land) while my wife and a couple others helped the EMT load her. Docs said that she had less than an hour or so before long-term consequences or death.
Any emergency beacon is better than none, but two-way communication can be a literal lifesaver. I hope that the Starlink system is eventually linked into our 911 infrastructure and available to anyone with an LTE phone regardless of carrier.
Two-way communication is important to prevent false positive emergencies, too. There have been several times I've used my inReach to message that I'm going to miss my planned check-in time, but everything is OK - no need to alert SAR.
Also to communicate on-the-fly decision-making to inform potential SAR - "I'm making good time, going to head up this extra peak before continuing the planned route."
I'm happy to have a cell phone backup to the inReach, but I don't see this Starlink offering as a replacement. That goes double if you're out in winter. Phone batteries aren't great in the cold.
Phone batteries are fine down to -20C and usually are functional to about -30C.
You should have no problem with that anywhere in the world as long as you keep it in an inner pocket. Perhaps pack wired earphones just in case you need to make a long call while keeping the phone itself warm.
Notably the battery should not be charged below about 5C. If you do, it will be permanently damaged.
Respectfully, I don't know about that. I wouldn't trust it if my life was on the line. I go for walks and bike rides when it's -25C to -30C air temperature (before windchill) and I've had old samsung galaxies and newer pixels both crash if I take them out to take a photo. I presumable due to voltage dip.
This is exactly the reason why I'm sticking with the CAT S6x series phones and willing to put up with mediocre performance/features, as far as smartphones go.
They've been the only ones that don't just turn off in really cold temperatures, even without babying them in warm pockets.
The general ruggedness is also pretty good to amazing, depending on how fragile your previous phones were. For example: it survived a ~10 meter (32ft) drop on rocks, whereas everyone was convinced it was done for.
Once I was stuck with a ridesharing car opened and off in -20C because my old samsung s8 throttled so bad I couldn't even reboot it. It was completely unresponive with the flashlight still on discharging it even faster.
I couldn't leave the car too, being responsible for damages during the rent.
After a bit of time I remembered that to force shut down newer androids you have to hold volume down and power. Why would they not keep it as a long press is beyond me.
To someone that lives in a place where we just had an entire summer of 40°C and higher, -25°C sounds like Antarctica, or Mars. And you do that on a bicycle? Clearly, you must be an alien!
Thanks for the laugh. I send my australian friends photos of snowbanks and iced up hair. The hardest part if having a plan if something goes wrong, e.g. I'm not changing a tire or fixing a chain at that temperature. I've been tempted to wait on a bus at a slow train crossing. At least cold I can layer up with and move. I'd die at +40C.
I had that in my hometown in eastern France at 800m altitude, a town a few km away has a record of -41. -15/-20c was almost a yearly occurance when I was a kid
I don't know if those exist. I imagine if you are a linemans or working in the oil field you might have a rugged phone/radio or leave it in the truck cab.
> Notably the battery should not be charged below about 5C. If you do, it will be permanently damaged.
This depends on the specific battery chemistry. The
BMS should prevent the charging scenarios which would damage the battery.
For some it's 0C not 5C. Some can handle charging below 0C.
Isn't that a stock feature on pretty much every chip? I mean, if you've got a temperature sensor for overtemperature protection, including undertemperature protection is trivial.
Even the cheapest chips from TI and ST seem to include it. And modern cell phones often advertise extra-fast 20W+ charging, so I doubt they're using the cheapest chips.
My last two phones (Xiaomi 9T and Pixel 7) have struggled below about -5C. They still work but the battery drops very quickly so you can't rely upon them. Keeping them in an inner pocket works but I then take them out and see the battery drop. The sudden temperature change might not help there.
my iphone 6s and 12 pro beg to differ. both saw serious drops in battery in pretty normal 10-15F chicago winters while I was outdoor ice skating or even just going for a long walk with the phone in my pocket.
> I hope that the Starlink system is eventually linked into our 911 infrastructure and available to anyone with an LTE phone regardless of carrier.
If Starlink's solution is really completely unmodified LTE, I'd expect 911 calls to work regardless of being a T-Mobile subscriber, just like for existing terrestrial networks (where you can dial 911 even if your carrier does not have signal in a given location, or even entirely without a SIM card).
The shift is actually not that extreme in LEO (a few KHz at most).
And couldn’t the satellites mostly adjust for that, given that the relative doppler shift should be pretty constant between mobiles in the same spot beam?
Obviously it's not constant, but if it's uniform (enough) within the footprint of a single spot beam, the satellites can adjust for the global component both in their transmitter and receiver, and the mobile devices only have to compensate for (or tolerate) their local difference from that.
I don't know how much I'm allowed to say, but at least part of what they're doing is normal Cat-1 LTE that any modem that supports it will be able to pick up
As far as I understand, the timing advance only matters to compensate for differences in distance/latency between different devices (i.e. to avoid uplink transmissions to talk over each other on the same frequency).
The satellites can correct for "global" latency themselves (unless there are higher-level parts of the LTE/E-UTRA radio protocol that can't tolerate such long latencies, e.g. ARQ timers).
For GSM as a half-duplex technology, there's also the matter of devices not being able to transmit and receive at the same time, but I believe the same principle applies: As long as the timing differences between different devices in the same spot beam isn't too large, that's something the satellites could globally correct for.
The same probably applies for doppler corrections.
> you can call emergency services to your precise location.
I guess this is the first time it's occurred to me that hikers and backpackers and such carry them too, which is odd because I hike and backpack.
I picked up the InReach after finding myself 200 miles offshore in a sailboat without an engine or battery power (which meant no VHF or electronic navigation equipment or autopilot or even red/green lights for others to see us at night) nor any way to make power
I assume the 406 Mhz beacon has a range of a few miles?
406MHz I think is referencing PLBs and EPIRBs, which I'm guessing you're familiar with from sailing. The power is high enough that satellites can be used to get gross location, with radio direction finding being used by rescue party
Other than the compass (which was only visible in the day time) the EPIRB was the only piece of equipment we assumed to work on the aforementioned voyage. We of course didn't test it as we were able to make it back safely, but I should probably learn more about how it functions.
I’m surprised that things like US military-style tritium-illuminated compasses aren’t more popular or widely used for cases like this.
They’re very safe, last something like 10 years, and aren’t really expensive (compared to “I need to know what direction I’m going and have no way to do so, or can’t see it”).
It would have been a delightful addition and honestly would have kept us much safer. It was fairly easy to keep Orion's belt just port of the mast, but occasionally cloud cover or weather would make that more difficult.
with no propulsion, I'm assuming you were just drifting and not really doing to much navigation. just curious if you tried any celestial navigation at night to attempt any sense of direction?
Yeah. We mostly just picked out a set of stars and kept them roughly to position. Every so often we'd try to illuminate the fixed compass with a phone to ensure that we hadn't wildly drifted from our expected bearing (also, stars move over the course of the night and I have no idea how much)
It was an old race boat, we had ample wind, and the owner casually bragged that he'd replaced the sails with ones that were "about 30% too big for the boat."
We were sailing like demons. One of my biggest regrets of the trip was that we didn't have any wind or speed instrumentation to let us know how fast we were going, but it felt extremely fast.
If it were me, I’d assume backup paper navigation charts and either a handheld battery powered backup GPS or my smartphone that has an app to parse data from the GPS chip. Could use primarily dead reckoning plus turn the phone on every couple hours to update true location. Most sailors are using paper charts for tricky sections anyways — you just normally have a constant GPS location provided by your navigation system.
There are also lots of established shipping lanes you could find that would be relatively densely traveled and give you periodic feedback for which direction to go. A bit more dangerous due to collisions without lights but as long as your retroreflector is hoisted, big ships should see you clearly on radar. plus you’ll generally be swapping sleep shifts and always have someone manning the helm on the sailboat, though seeing large vessels at night can be somewhat more difficult.
Mostly all that's right. We had three phones and a few battery packs (tho we'd exhausted them more quickly than expected and lost one to rain) because the paper charts aboard were from the late 80s when the boat was built and were all for the Pacific ocean it was built to sail.
The only other complicating factor was that due to the August Florida heat, nobody really had the luxury of sleep for the first couple of days.
> Most sailors are using paper charts for tricky sections anyways — you just normally have a constant GPS location provided by your navigation system.
My experience in Marine SAR is that this is no longer true. Apps like Navionics, SeaPilot, etc - often without any backup at all - are by far the most common form of navigation.
Yeah. I've spent a lot of time learning charts and a terribly small amount of time actually using them. In this case, we didn't have the right ones anyway.
Offered to help the owner (a friend of a friend of a friend) of an older racing sailboat move his boat from Florida to Maryland. It was planned to be us and 4-5 other crew, but (red flag the first) ended up being only me, my wife, and the owner.
There were lots of red flags before finding ourselves in squarely over our heads -- an overheating motor was explained away as having had an undersized thermostat installed. Plausible enough. The lack of a bimini in August in Florida was just forgotten, but led to pretty significant overheating to me. The autopilot not working we didn't realize until about 15 miles offshore. That the autopilot was draining all the other batteries we didn't realize until we lost navigation lights. Etc. Etc.
This was embarrassingly recent, but suffice to say a LOT of lessons were learned. The boat was foreign enough that I accepted too many "explanations" as comfort when they should have been a reason to abort. Failures compounded and voila, we're now 15 hours away from civilization flying a spinnaker through thunderstorms at night and positively hauling ass.
Eventually we got the owner to appreciate our discomfort enough and how over our heads we were to head to safety in Charleston (he'd still just been heading east, which was baffling -- but apparently it is not everyone's first instinct to go to safety when life-threatening failures crop up) but that brought its own perils -- coming into a crowded channel at night without navigation lights isn't advised. We were shining a flashlight onto the sails, but the flashlight would change modes if it wasn't held steadily enough. One of the storms we'd sailed through had killed the owner's phone as well as his phone charger, so the little bits of navigation we had were precious, but necessary coming into shallower coastal waters. A cargo ship coming out of harbor kicked us out of the channel just enough that we ended up grounded and stuck pretty squarely about a half mile away from restaurants, but late enough on a Sunday that there wasn't any other traffic we could hail down. (A radio would have been lovely in that case)
I was sunburnt and heat-stroked enough that despite guzzling water constantly, I hadn't urinated in 24 hours, and though we were in relative calm, the totality of circumstances, I used the last of the dwindling battery on the last usable phone among us to call the coast guard for evacuation. The owner of the boat stayed behind.
To paraphrase Cheryl Strayed -- If you'd asked me at any point in the journey, I was absolutely miserable, but on the whole it was miraculous. Gained a ton of skills. Learned a ton of red flags to look out for. Experienced a lot of firsts, not the least of which included a crash course in celestial navigation. And being 200 miles offshore and awake the whole night during the Perseid meteor shower was absolutely brilliant.
"If you'd asked me at any point in the journey, I was absolutely miserable, but on the whole it was miraculous. Gained a ton of skills."
Sounds a lot like ocean racing sailboats under normal circumstances.
I quit ocean racing (after about 5 seasons) when I had a sudden realisation that the only part that was any fun in the last 3 days was sitting in the bar after it was over and talking about it. And there were ten times as many non-crew people there enjoying that with us as there were crew on the boat I raced on.
lmao -- we checked on him the next morning. He didn't answer my call, but that made sense as his phone had died, so we drove by where it had been stranded and it wasn't there so he'd moved. Felt guilty that we couldn't get in touch with him to offer him a ride back in our rental car, but caught up with him a few weeks later and he managed to get the boat into a slip somewhere down there.
As usual, there's pros and cons, and talking about just one side causes bias. Yes, a PLB can work with more obstructions like trees. However:
With PLB, satellites can't accurately measure where the PLB is; the search and rescue crew will find you by local radio reception.
With a satellite messenger, the gadget knows its own GPS location to a pinpoint and can send that as part of the SOS signal. And you can text the SAR staff and say "I fell and I'm now stuck on a tall ledge halfway up the cliff".
>Now we need app developers to log off their fiber-served wifi when writing messenger apps, and log into a high-latency, low-bandwidth, high-packet-loss network instead so Messages will actually open instead of whatever it's trying to do to upload my location history and download contact pictures...
FWIW, it's perfectly possible to simulate arbitrary levels of bandwidth/latency with a variety of tools even while having a fiber connection. For example, Macs have long had the "Network Link Conditioner" tool as a free utility included with the Additional Tools for Xcode package, which then allows simulating configurable bandwidth, latency, and packet loss. There are similar tools for Linux as well, tc is powerful. Most firewalls with quality traffic shapers also allow at least the first two at the network level, I used that on OPNsense to simulate a VSAT connection with 750ms latency and 4/.5 to a specific VLAN so that we could just connect systems and then see how applications worked. It's been awhile but it was eye opening. A nice thing about that approach is that then you can just connect devices to a given VLAN, which makes testing back and forth super easy. Wired is trivial of course, have a switch where each port is a different test VLAN, but even for wireless if you have WAPs that support PPSK/MPSK, then hopping between test VLANs just means reconnecting with a different password. Simulating packet loss with a network device seems the be more niche and complicated and I don't know if any firewalls put a GUI on it. tc queue disciplines can be used though so any Linux device with two network ports can sit inline and modify the traffic to simulate loss/latency, an RPi would be fine for that.
I agree it'd be nice if more app developers would test under less than ideal conditions, particularly since it's so trivial to do so. I think most simply don't think about it though, same as many GUIs (web or local) not testing for stuff like various types of color blindness.
> it's perfectly possible to simulate arbitrary levels of bandwidth/latency with a variety of tools even while having a fiber connection.
Yes it is perfectly possible, but it’s very difficult. Having just gone through this process I can attest that this is not something the average “app developer” is going to be capable of doing, at least on Linux and Windows.
The raw tools are there, but they are complicated, poorly documented, and require network engineering knowledge on top of software development knowledge.
Probably there is some nice package to wrap up the whole “generate a virtual network and add latency + packet loss between these two end points”, I just never found it.
It's not that they won't be "capable of doing" it, it's that the effort required will be more than they care to put into solving a problem they can't sympathise with and/or isn't a requirement handed down from their boss. App developers have to jump through all sorts of technical hooks to get certain things done, but since their jobs depend on it, they power though. If "work reliably even in shit network conditions" was a baseline requirement that their jobs depended on, you bet they'd find a way.
As for how hard it actually is: iOS has already been explained, the Android emulator has network latency and speed simulation right in the GUI, as do most web browsers. And there's alway the option to switch your phone to 2G only in the settings and/or go into the basement or elevator.
>If "work reliably even in shit network conditions" was a baseline requirement that their jobs depended on, you bet they'd find a way.
This is the real problem - there are deadlines and most projects don't even consider working in questionable network conditions. Developers aren't going to put in the extra effort when it doesn't contribute to the job they are asked to do.
I have had to deal with poor App/Play Store reviews for both of "It doesn't work on the train while I'm commuting in the morning" and "It doesn't work at the event when there are 100,000+ other people there" flaky network related problems.
I always at least _ask_ in the requirements gathering stage for a new mobile app: "how much effort do we want to dedicate to app performance/reliability under marginal network conditions?"
As it turns out, pretty much all mobile app owners are as apathetic about that as most mobile app developers. (On the other hand, once you've got a reputation for being able to handle those sorts of flaky network edge cases, you get more and more work for the sort of apps that benefit from them. The downside of that is it's never the flashy resume-building-apps that come to you for this.)
> Probably there is some nice package to wrap up the whole “generate a virtual network and add latency + packet loss between these two end points”, I just never found it.
trickle is clever, but when I've tried to use it for "use no more than this" bandwidth shaping (basically going for "rsync --bwlimit" but for a set of "related" rsync processes) the arguments given had very little to do with the amount of bandwidth actually consumed. (We found another way but definitely look at tc instead.)
> Yes it is perfectly possible, but it’s very difficult. ...
shrug
Disagree, it's no harder than any other linux subsystem, you can use `tc` or you can attack it a different way by using virtualization then messing with it at the vde layer. I've added storage and network random latency for testing code before, took a day or so to get working perfectly, but now it's in a shell script.
Hm, alternatively.... you're right, it's very difficult. You should hire a software engineer, such as myself, to do it for you. ;-) ;-)
Like parent said, Network Link Conditioner is exactly that tool. It's even built directly into iOS (though only visible in settings once "used for development" via XCode).
> For example, Macs have long had the "Network Link Conditioner" tool as a free utility included with the Additional Tools for Xcode package, which then allows simulating configurable bandwidth, latency, and packet loss.
Well, I sure wish Apple would make use of that functionality themselves once in a while.
It's frustratingly impossible to enqueue an iMessage message while out of signal and have it be automatically delivered once back in cell coverage. Bizarrely WhatsApp, a third-party application (with all the background execution restrictions that go with that), manages to do just that!
I find Firefox and Chrome's network-limiter feature to be "unrealistically unreliable" insofar as it limits data transfer bandwidth, and simulates some kinds of latency issues, but doesn't seem to implement things like DNS suddenly stopping working for 5 seconds, or sporadic network drop-outs, or how some things will arrive out-of-order, or an entire web-page blocked by a single synchronous <script> from one particular external host.
I agree. It needs to simulate a phone right on the edge of connectivity, with the random 5 second dropouts, followed by 50 Mbps but downstream only, followed by another dropout, followed by 1kbps up and down, etc.
That's the way real networks behave, and what real users have to manage with.
> Now we need app developers to log off their fiber-served wifi when writing messenger apps
You should try WhatsApp - there really are not many messenger choices when you have unreliable 2G(!) connectivity. For all the faults of Meta, WhatsApp seems to be the only company that cares about people with bandwidth measured in kbps, sometimes fractions thereof.
> For all the faults of Meta, WhatsApp seems to be the only company that cares about people with bandwidth measured in kbps, sometimes fractions thereof.
WhatsApp was built with low-bandwidth/high-latency/high-packet-loss in mind well before Meta acquired them.
I suppose we can give them vague amounts of credit for not making those use cases worse since the acquisition.
To be fair, it used to be "encrypted" using a scheme not too far removed from ROT13; now it's using the Signal protocol, which probably requires quite a few more bytes per message.
For example, messaging a contact with multiple devices connected means that your phone has to encrypt your message to each of their clients independently.
Offline queueing is a fantastic feature! I know someone who lives in a remote area whose phone only gets network connectivity when they walk up a specific hill. In many ways, they use WhatsApp the way most people used email in the dialup days: read and compose offline, then go online once a day to send and receive new messages.
Edit: I sometimes get a chuckle when they say "Look at this cool picture I took", and then receive the picture some days later when the conversation thread has moved on. I guess they'd have stayed in thr coverage area for long enough for the entire image to upload.
Any idea how it compares to Signal? They should be essentially using the same protocol. I also used it with good results with slow connectivity, but never tried on bad 2G...
The encryption protocol is fairly unrelated to how an app handles poor connectivity. It’s a bit like comparing different websites handling poor connectivity differently even though they are all served over HTTP.
I have tried to use signal in a location that had voice, but no data (a very old, very rural tower in the middle of nowhere) a few years ago, and signal was completely worthless. Even though it can read and receive SMS, it seems to require a data connection to send..
I believe their communication layers are fairly different – WhatsApp used to use something based on XMPP at least until a while ago; I'm not sure what Signal uses, but I vaguely remember it being based on HTTP?
Can definitely be, I never investigated in detail, although I used alternative open source clients for both (signal-cli and a long time ago yowsup), so the information should be in there...
I hoped that Signal's use of HTTP was as a fallback in case a direct connection could not be established to use a more "compact" protocol, but I possibly don't remember correctly what I've read...
It's huge in many countries where Internet service has been expensive or difficult to come by. Case in point, all my relatives in Eastern Europe use WhatsApp, and with better bandwidth options, some are using FB Messenger for video calls,.as well.
While it's plausible that I, too, will cancel my inreach subscription over this i'm not so entirely convinced.
My InReach (I have an Explorer, not the mini) is an exceedingly rugged bit of kit with an effectively infinite battery life.
It is, by no means, a sleek or svelte device like my iPhone but if I fell down on a trail and broke all my fingers (or had severe frostbite or something) I'm fairly confident I could operate the device with some combination of my teeth, nose and toes.
I'm also fairly sure that it will keep functioning even if I had accidentally dropped it off a cliff, in a blizzard, into an ocean.
The mini is basically the same kind of rugged so you know exactly what I mean :)
The battery also lasts basically forever.
I turned mine on about 48h ago before a trip and it's been on ever since and I just checked and the battery is at 86% with 2-minute tracking intervals.
Anyway I am still very happy for the starlink service for the 99% of people who don't have an InReach, it will definitely save lives, I'm just not yet ready to ditch my InReach.
For the InReach use case, there's still something to be said for a rugged, long battery life, dedicated device (assuming you're cautious enough to have one and subscribe to the service). On the other hand, everything is a tradeoff and if your lifestyle is such that having a dedicated inReach is unlikely to ever be a key piece of safety equipment, there's a lot to be said for just relying on your phone.
There's very little bandwidth you need when you're in the backcountry, especially given some reasonable pre-download of maps and other information.
I'm not a backcountry skier or much of a hiker but if I was, I'd much rather have a rugged device that can survive much better than an expensive piece of glass. I've damaged phones in the past by them getting bent in my pocket during rigorous activities. If my crumpled body is laying at the bottom of a cliff, I doubt my phone fared much better. A solid body device with a simple interface could be the difference in me being found in a couple hours or a couple weeks.
Direct to phone satcom is neat and I can see plenty of applications for it but I know that I wouldn't stake my life on it simply due to it being a consumer-grade phone.
I do a lot of hiking and have never broken my phone in the wilderness (or in town either, I've scratched and cracked the screen, but never enough to make the phone inoperable). I generally travel with someone else, so it's even less likely that we'll all break our phones at the same time -- if I were hiking by myself, I'd be a lot more worried about having an injury prevent me from calling for help rather than having a broken phone prevent it.
I do carry an InReach when I hike in remote areas but if my phone could make satellite emergency communications, I'd stop paying $144 a year for the InReach.
If InReach dropped the price to $50/year, then I'd consider still subscribing to it.
100% - They don't make phones strong enough to be reliable as a life safety device. As an active person I've broken my pocketed phone several times in incidents that were otherwise unmemorable as they were minor spills.
I laughed at that picture of the mountaineer in full Alpine climbing attire, on a tablet.
What's he doing on it, checking his email? The view behind him isn't good enough?
I'm thinking the same.. if I've fallen off a cliff or crashed my bike and broken my leg, possibly in shock too, I want something rugged & simple to activate like a PLB
I do trail-running, backpacking and skiing in the Colorado backcountry. I'd never trust my safety to a cell phone due to the fragility, temperature sensitivity and poor battery life. I carry an inReach and have used the SOS feature. That thing is bullet proof and can tether to my cell phone anyway if I want the convenience of the phone for typing messages etc.
I think your concern is warranted as vehicle accidents and falls may call into question the durability of the device in question however based on the mix of accidents and especially the prevalence of medical misadventures its probably a worthwhile feature even if you don't opt for something desired for extra durability.
Another logical concern is battery life. A huge chunk of non-fatal misadventures are day hikers and the dominant cause is actually dummies wandering off trail as opposed to injury.
I literally just destroyed an iPhone which was in my pocket, in a case, and I apparently smashed it into a rock (which I wasn't even really aware of except it was rugged hiking generally). Probably protected my thigh.
I do carry a spare battery etc. I suppose I could keep my phone in a rugged case in my pack and use something else for pictures and maps but that's sort of getting away from the idea of one device you always have right with you.
> I've damaged phones in the past by them getting bent in my pocket during rigorous activities
I got a 4g nokia dumb phone just for this occasion - few days of battery life, sturdy build, good for small trips/hikes where you usually have signal or as a backup phone
Personally I just keep a spare cellphone battery in a pocket for emergencies. Would be awesome to have this service. I'm using a T-Mobile MVNO and last I checked they had no idea if T-Mobile would be extending them the service.
there's certainly a use-case for something like an inreach as a dedicated safety device for true backcountry adventures. but there's a whole lot of cases that aren't that, but you can still be out of cell service and have an urgent need to communicate.
for me, even just driving to the next town over, or going for a bike ride that takes me less than two hours from my house, there's places where the cell connection cuts out. i'm not packing an inreach for an hour drive, but it's nice to know that if i need it i can count on my cell phone.
Not sure if it’s still this way, but Kotzebue AK was the perfect place to test low bandwidth internet. The over the horizon satellite uplink the entire town shared could only allocate 56k speeds to each client and had horrific packet loss.
I had to rearchitect an entire file synchronization and uplink system for resilience while sitting in a hotel room in the middle of a blizzard during the shortest days of the year so I could deploy software for clients up there.
It's actually trivial to simulate a high-latency low bandwidth network on Linux with the traffic control subsystem, one need not switch networks at all.
tc qdisc change dev enp1s0 root netem delay 300ms 200ms loss 10% 80%
This command delays all packets in and out of the wired interface enp1s0 300ms, +/- 200ms, with 10-80% packet loss.
I have an InReach Mini that I use when I go offshore fishing, where I'm out of cell range by 40 miles or more. The Mini is nice, when it works. Most messages I send take 15-20 minutes to send, and the delay is even longer on receiving most of the time. And that's in the middle of a large body of water with no obstruction of the sky.
I've been waiting with bated breath since the announcement of Starlink in the hopes that it could knock out the three satellite services I use the most: InReach Mini for text comms and location sharing, XM Radio, and XM Weather.
I'm really looking forward to when this becomes available for individuals and not just businesses. Also really looking forward to 12v Starlink equipment and affordable marine plans.
So basically app developers should build low bandwidth apps - that would be a win for high bandwidth users too. Everything transfers massive amounts of data exhausting even gigabit fibre fast.
There anre also environments that are high-speed but high-cost or capped gb/month.
I like how I can tell an iPhone that a wifi AP is a “low bandwidth” one so it holds off on many tasks. But you can screw yourself over if you tether a computer, even a Mac.
I’ve found recently that TripMode keeps forgetting the apps I’ve blocked. Haven’t done any investigation, but it’s disconcerting when I check the list and find that iCloud is once again enabled.
The US is fairly unique in that everyone still texts. The rest of the world use apps that need data, like WhatsApp.
While SMS would be great for low-bandwidth use cases like this, most people don't use it to the point where having contacts accessible with it on the other end would be an issue.
As far as I understood, this is because US carries throws unlimited SMS for free and data is costly.
In my country, it's possible to get unlimited sms but for additional fee on some carries (other carries just provide N SMS per month) and data prices are rather low even now.
If they're on Whatsapp, then they've got their number. Surely everyone can receive an SMS? If its an emergency, you're not going to care what app you're using, just so long as you can communicate.
This messaging app already exists, it called Telegram. I was on a boat around Aeolian Islands and Telegram started working once my phone got Edge (=2G) coverage. Slack and WhatsApp were unable even to connect to server without at least 3G.
> Now we need app developers to log off their fiber-served wifi when writing messenger apps
or also any web app.
In a Rails app I recently started working on for a customer I saw many controller actions starting with a call to a method called simulate_delay_for_development. I checked the code and when run in development mode it basically sleeps for a random value between 0.1 and 3.0 seconds.
I'm sure that there are gems for that or proxy servers sitting between the browser and the server, but it's a cheap and effective way to make every developer experience delays with zero installation costs.
I was recently in a fairly remote area of the Sierras and my iPhone when totally haywire and then died. Somehow water had gotten inside. That makes me a little concerned about depending on my phone for everything in the backcountry, but maybe what I need is a really good case for it.
Or get a cheap "armored" waterproof Android phone. There is a whole thing of Android phones that look like Black and Decker designed ruggedized phones, some of them with extra large batteries. My son has one that is pretty much indestructible. Also ugly enough some other kids cornered him and wanted to "see it" a while back and decided it wasn't even worth stealing.
I have one of those - “builder phones” as some call them - for outdoor activities.
Cheap, fucking indestructible, and you could probably bludgeon someone to death with it in a pinch.
It also has a thermal imaging camera which is surprisingly handy for stuff like “finding where in the garden my cat is hiding at night” or “figuring out what’s overheating” or monitoring the state of my compost bin.
I can take my inreach mini underwater up to 50 meters with the official accessory dive case (I bottom out at 45). Short of making a custom case I can't do that with a cell phone and I'm not sure it's rugged enough to take even small waves.
If I’m reading the docs correctly the satellites will offer SMS service directly so you won’t need an app, you’ll just need your carrier or roaming provider to support it.
Unfortunately, it's incredibly hard to convince an iPhone to actually send an SMS to a specific number, at least if the contact is registered for iMessage...
What if I know that the recipient doesn’t have a data connection, but I do?
This is all incredibly clunky and one of the weakest points of iOS in my view. How can it be so hard to provide a switch that lets me use SMS proactively?
Obviously we shouldn't pretend sat phones from Garmin and others haven't existed for decades, but Starlink direct to cell is very different. First, as others have mentioned, traditional sat phones requires dedicated hardware with a chonky antenna; this works with normal cellphones, which means order of magnitude higher adoption. Maybe more fundamentally, the satellites that existing sat phones use are in much higher orbits so there is irreducible latency (due to speed of light) and bandwidth costs that LEO Starlink sats will likely crush in the next few years.
It’s too bad you’ll still need a “regular” cellular sub to take advantage of this. If I didn’t, this gets me a lot closer to “cutting” the wireless plan cord.
I’m usually in wifi range and being able to have a few kb/s of comms is basically the lifeline I need.
Most of my cell activities are cached on my phone: podcasts, maps, some increasingly out of date weather.
Would be even cooler if it could “broadcast” some regular stuff like news and traffic updates (dunno how that could integrate with Waze…)
The first kb/s gets me a loooot of value and each additional is less useful than the last. Data is very much diminishing returns.
> It’s too bad you’ll still need a “regular” cellular sub to take advantage of this.
For the emergency use case:
Would it even be legal to require a subscription for 911 calls?
As far as I know, these are possible even without a SIM card in the US and most other countries.
> The first kb/s gets me a loooot of value and each additional is less useful than the last. Data is very much diminishing returns.
And it’s arguably priced accordingly: The difference between metered plans and unlimited data is pretty small these days in my observation.
By lifeline I don’t mean 9-1-1, but rather some basic barebones comms.
> The difference between metered plans and unlimited data is pretty small these days in my observation.
That’s if you have a competitive environment. In Canada, the cellular providers are the fixed-line internet providers and very much don’t want to tank one for the other.
(But maybe Freedom Mobile, without much of a physical wireline footprint, will pull a t-mobile and go all-in on a 5G wireless home internet plan… we can pray)
Oh, yeah, all of these considerations only apply to a somewhat functioning/competitive market, unfortunately.
I have my fingers crossed for you! I've had friends of mine live in Canada for a while – it sounds as bad as (or even worse than) what was going on in Germany in the 2000s, when mobile operators had spent ridiculous sums on 3G licenses and almost ruined themselves in the process financially and as a result just sat out on infrastructure investments for the next decade or so.
Likewise, this would be enough to replace my cell plan. I don’t need high bandwidth stuff, just text communications, PagerDuty, gmail. The rest I can do over Wi-Fi.
Given the price per bit per second per square meter, I'd be surprised if this will be more economical for operators to provide in anything but the most rural areas.
Maps can be downloaded offline and directions calculated locally. Only really need updates for traffic (which could be broadcast, which I think some old gps receivers had)
There's other potential advantage (or disadvantage depending on how you view it).
Some countries like India don't like sat phones on their territory.
Some countries like Russia are ok with them but require local connection to terrestial networks and local licenses.
Some countries are in territorial disputes.
What if SpaceX or other such company decide (or would be "gently asked to") it could ignore local regulations in such country? What if it would be done for good?
Possible example: somebody lobbies ITU(via some kind of "emergency license for humanitarian purposes only") to allow SpaceX to allow SpaceX to serve Gaza for free with limits and USA is ok with it. Israel is against it but what they could do? Jam Starlink? What if they also use it? What if 10 years in future same thing is done to North Korea(it could be even more legal - as far as I understood, both Koreas claims they are only legitimate goverment of Korea so SK could issue formal license)?
Looking forward to a future Starlink+Apple/Google collab.
Dunno what frequency this is running at, but if it’s in the 10s of GHz, I’m assuming licensing doesn’t get tooooo pricey given how problematic it is on land-to-land links.
It works with existing 4G/LTE phones, so it will be using the standard 4G/LTE bands, which run up to 2.6 Ghz.
Presumably that's why SpaceX needs to ride on existing mobile operators: they already own LTE spectrum and can allocate a chunk of it for satellite services. It would be a lot of work (and cost) for SpaceX to go out and buy LTE spectrum in every country they want to operate in.
Sacrificing a chunk of that precious spectrum is huge though. Is LTE flexible enough to run some form of on-demand TDM between multiple base stations on top of it? Can it operate smaller cells on the same channels within the range of the larger cell, forcing the smaller cell to make do with other parts of the spectrum while the larger calls dibs?
Afaik older cellular protocols were relying on zero overlap between base stations serving the same frequencies, leading to a nice coloring problem that would seriously suffer if someone tried to fit in LEO cells.
I'm no LTE expert, but I'm pretty sure that it handles overlap: you can run LTE diagnostic apps on Android that will display all the visible base stations - often many are visible, sometimes 3 or more on the same band. Your phone looks at what's available and picks a combination with the best signal strength (sometimes it will connect on 2 or 3 different bands simultaneously with carrier aggregation).
But even then, most carriers have many bands/channels (EARFCNs) available - and presumably only a small slice of bandwidth is needed for this service considering it's (initially) only for text messages. Finding 5 Mhz on one of the higher LTE frequencies wouldn't be so hard for many carriers, even if it does need an exclusive channel.
> Apple/Google don't hold any RF spectrum rights worldwide...
yet. Apple (and android baseband suppliers, “Google” may be the wrong name to mention here), have the ability to take relatively worthless spectrum and make it widely useful in a way nobody else can.
I wonder how spectrum allocation works for C-Band satellite broadcasters that just blast continents with their signals. Grandfathered?
Most satellite-y things don’t and Starlink’s direct to cell won’t either.
Hence why the spectrum should be pretty cheap (along with its incredible susceptibility to obstructions… which is less of an issue when you’re going roughly “up” without pesky considerations like curvature of the earth)
And you do get a ton of gain with a small antenna at those high frequencies.
Me too, but at slower data rates. At 550km above, that’s still a big signal loss by inverse square law. Problem with slow data rates is that they clog up the channels.
Phased arrays work without having to repoint, but they don't overcome lack of incidence (insolation?)
(e.g. we can't build a solar panel that works perpendicular to the sun (or nearly perpendicular) using phased array technology because there just isn't much solar radiation hitting the "dish" in the first place)
SpaceX already works with Google, where Google allows Starlink to use its datacenters' network connectivity for downlink, while Google gets to use Starlink for data transfer.
The difference here is you don't need a dedicated device or service, you can just use your existing cell phone. As Starlink is only providing the backhaul and cell carriers their spectrum, service will improve as the constellation grows not whenever the carriers feel like investing in it.
> Stuff like this has existed from companies like garmin for some time.
No, this is entirely different from what Garmin and others sell.
Those devices require dedicated hardware (and a subscription plan) to talk to satellites. Also you can only send and receive text messages. (no voice, extremely limited data (like weather reports))
What SpaceX are doing uses a completely normal phone, with a completely normal phone plan. It's text for now, but voice and data are coming.
Text is announced for 2024. And personally, I'd be really surprised if that actually works out for unmodified phones sold today. I've written more about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37848212
I believe this is addressed in the video that I linked. There are very good compression algorithms to allow voice, and "browsing" means something akin to slow dialup.
This is not something that could, for instance, replace your cell phone carrier.
In the video at 21:00 Elon clarifies: 2-4 megabits per cell zone.
Sorry if that was confusing. I mean that for instance: tmobile will be adding this to their coverage map, but they're not getting rid of the towers, and the primary way your phone is communicating with the world is not going to be via starlink satellites.
I occasionally get kicked down to 128 kbps for a few hours at the end of a month and a surprisingly large fraction of the internet still works.
They are targeting voice which can go really low, but a moderately optimistic ~100kps is vastly better than 0. Much below that and the number of people using it is going to drop near 0.
AT&T actually enforces it for tethering. If I really need something I can still use my phone, but it’s convenient to leave the phone where it gets reception and then use the tablet nearby.
I mean, I fire up and use lynx from time to time for a couple newspapers and magazine. Beyond evading some paywalls, it also presents it the way I want it: a wall of text. “Slow dialup” to me is 2.4kbps.
The gain on those antennas must be insane, any idea how they work? There are millions of devices down there (from the angular resolution perspective of the satellite).
It’s still invaluable at low bandwidth text up there.
Satellite data to run infrastructure (even cc processing for cards) where there is zero connectivity or power for hundreds of miles will likely become at least one order of magnitude more accessible price wise.
Please disrupt the personal satellite beacon market. Currently the only options are proprietary devices that cost several hundred dollars AND a subscription plan that will run you $12 a month or more.
New iPhones include satellite SOS and location features. The monthly cost has not been announced yet, all phones with this feature are still in the 2-year free trial period.
There's a recent article about a climber who had to use this iPhone SOS feature. Turns out that actually getting in contact with emergency services is not easy - even though the satellite communications worked perfectly.
There was a lot of back and forth over the system, but it did not help at all. The thing that saved her was one 40 character message to a friend. Because apparently you get one of those, and no replies...
My understanding is that most[1] other satellite devices use a centralized dispatch center who have experience with backcountry emergencies.
Speculating obviously, but that article makes it sound like Apple might have tried do something else and that whatever they came up with is more equipped to deal with frontcountry issues.
My wife and I and our two kids do a fair amount of back-country white water rafting. After arriving at a very remote take-out with no car and no cell service after a five day float (and running low on food and water), we went ahead and bought an actual satellite phone. It’s a game changer. Cost about $400 used and we have it refreshing quarterly on BlueCosmo for $99. It’s awesome, and cheap insurance relative to the risk.
Ah, that’s too bad. I think (please correct if I’m wrong) those have some trouble in canyons at higher latitudes. The nice thing about Iridium is if you wait a few minutes, a bird will usually show up overhead. It’s nice for SAR missions we help with in the mountains.
I suspect you're right about the advantages of Iridium. All I can say is that we live in Oregon and I've been able to get out of canyons pretty well. I've used it on the John Day, Deschutes and Grande Ronde, mostly to coordinate with shuttles or check in back home. I cannot speak to other geographies. The profound advantages of two-way instant communication in an emergency would justify hiking uphill a ways too. I'm rarely surrounded by sheer cliffs. But I'm sure there are circumstances where Iridium -- or Starlink! -- would work better. We bought a v2 standard Starlink setup for tailgating and camping and it's truly awesome. That technology in phones is a game changer. In truth, my wife and I have iPhone 14 Pro and 15 Pro, respectively. If the Inmarsat sat phone doesn't work, you can be sure we'd hit the button on the iPhones, which makes for a nice backup as I believe they use the Globalstar LEO satellites.
Don't expect it to work anytime soon or to supplant EPIRBs.
Even E911 locating in the US just doesn't work at all with nonzero and unknown combinations of phones, carriers, and jurisdictions. US LEOs have almost universal, real-time locating ability from N km to sub 1 m accuracy if it's in range of a single tower of any phone without a warrant. If a phone can send an SOS to a comm satellite, while there's a recent good fix from 3+ GNSS satellites, then that's useful.
The risk to avoid will be over-reliance on a consumer grade cell phone as a substitute for the ruggedized and proven EPIRB system.
I don't understand why Apple is adding satellite SOS to iphones but providing dangerously poor support for people in emergencies. There's a lot of situations in the backcountry where an injured person will survive 6 hours, but freeze to death after 10. Thank goodness for the emergency contact feature and that these climbers had a friend with enough skill to dispatch SAR. If Apple isn't careful they're going to have a front page story detailing how someone died an avoidable death because they dispatched an ambulance instead of search and rescue.
It’s not SOS only. You can also update your location in the Find My app, so your friends/family can keep track of you on a backpacking trip.
With iPhone 15, they also introduced the ability to call for roadside assistance from AAA via satellite too. (I’m not sure if this is also available on 14 now or not.)
> If your missing device can’t connect to the internet or has little to no battery life, the Find My app can still help you track it down using the Find My network — hundreds of millions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices around the world.
So this isn't going to help you in the wilderness.
The passage you quoted is talking about the iDevice-to-iDevice communication that can happen behind the scenes allowing you to find a lost phone in the wilderness if someone else so happens to walk by the phone.
Whenever I hear of this feature on an iPhone I think of the stellar iPhone battery life while it has probably generously been used for photos and location services etc.
> currently the only options are proprietary devices that cost several hundred dollars AND a subscription plan that will run you $12 a month or more
Consider a 406 MHz PLB [1][2][3]. Several hundred dollars. But no subscription fee.
They're terribly marketed, a vacuum Garmin et al happily fill. And you can't send text messages. But as an emergency beacon, they are best in class. (Garmin transmits at <2 watts. Cell phones maybe 125 mW. 406s, meanwhile, scream at the sky at 5+ watts; that's in class with a cell tower.)
On the other hand, Garmin/InReach use Iridium, which has safety-critical communication as its primary mission and provides it using a network featuring inter-satellite message routing.
COSPAS-SARSAT is usually a secondary payload of other satellites, is store-and-forward (i.e. if you're far from a ground station, it might take a while for a satellite to forward your emergency signal), and for most (but see [1]!) PLBs does not offer a return channel, i.e. you won't know whether your signal actually made it through or whether you'll need to keep moving to get line-of-sight.
> Garmin transmits at <2 watts. Cell phones maybe 125 mW. 406s, meanwhile, scream at the sky at 5+ watts; that's in class with a cell tower.
They use exactly as much transmit power as they need to. Importantly, Iridium modems get instant feedback on whether their transmission has made it through and can retransmit if required. Screaming isn't always the best way to be heard :)
> I think Iridium can handle four calls at a time.
It supports over a thousand simultaneous calls per satellite! And that’s voice calls; text messages like those used by InReach need much less resources still.
> Garmins have a ceiling. Terrain attenuates. There are more places you will be alone with a Garmin than a 406 MHz PLB.
What “ceiling”? As long as you have line-of-sight, the transmit power is enough to reach the satellite, and given polar orbits, you almost always do if you can see a bit of sky.
If you don’t have line-of-sight, COSPAS-SARSAT won’t work either, would it?
I assume the higher transmit power there is mostly to enable reaching satellites farther out (like the GPS and Galileo satellites, which are in MEO).
> 406 MHz does this […]
In some regions only, I believe, and with some beacons. It is a very important development though!
> Sorry, I meant inter-satellite. Iridium’s inter-satellite capability is highly limited and irrelevant for emergency comms.
It absolutely isn't, where are you getting this from? Both routine and emergency communications regularly traverse inter-satellite links. For a while, Iridium only had a very small number of operational ground terminals; nothing would work without inter-satellite links in that scenario.
> In ideal conditions. 5 watts vs something like 1.6 makes a huge practical difference.
Can you name a scenario where you'd get a signal through to a satellite with 5, but not 1.6 watts? This is absolutely negligible; even just rotating your transmitter ever so slightly will make a much, much bigger impact.
I have never not received an Iridium signal when there was line-of-sight to the satellite.
> There is a reason 406 MHz is the requirement for aviation.
Aviation and marine safety of life specifications care a lot about redundancy and availability. COSPAS-SARSAT is conceptually very simple and does not require ongoing subscriptions, so it makes for an excellent fallback option if other communication methods are unavailable.
For example, for passenger or cargo ships, you need at least two other bidirectional means of long-distance communication when crossing oceans. For polar routes outside of geostationary satellite coverage (i.e. Sea Area A4), the only real options (certifiable under SOLAS/GMDSS regulations) are HF radio and Iridium.
It’s more like $200-300 for the device and $5-8 per month for service these days.
Given the value in an emergency, I’d consider that fair!
And if you really only care about calling emergency services in the backcountry or at sea, you can always get a PLB (which have no recurring fees at all).
> And if you really only care about calling emergency services in the backcountry or at sea, you can always get a PLB (which have no recurring fees at all).
In the wilderness of Yukon and Alaksa we found we didn't need to call emergency services, but it was very handy to contact friends.
"I'm very stuck, but fine, come get me".
"I shot a moose, it would be great if you'd come and help me quarter it."
"We're perfectly fine, but delayed a couple of days."
Things like that are what we used our gen 1 spot for, and it was great.
Even in a serious situation, there's value in being able to coordinate with would-be rescuers. I'm in a bit of a pickle with a twisted ankle and I'm really going to have trouble walking all the way out by myself but I have food and water is a different situation from I've fallen 40 feet and conscious but have a broken leg and am getting really cold.
Importantly, with most current PLBs you don't actually see if your emergency call has been received at all, which can make an important difference for survival (i.e. it informs the decision whether it's best to stay put and try to hold out, or whether getting to higher ground with clearer sky is essential).
Fortunately, at least that part is changing: Cospas-Sarsat (the service listening for PLB emergency calls) can now use Galileo satellites as a return channel to send an acknowledgement to the newest PLBs in some regions [1].
It doesn't address the "type of emergency" concern, though – not everything requires a helicopter.
I haven't bought either a PLB or an InReach Mini, but seriously considered them while more actively adventuring all over the U.S. earlier. Here's what I think:
I really don't want to press the PLB emergency button unless my life is in danger and I need to be rescued by helicopter. PLBs are not good at all for "my car has failed and I'm 15 miles down a forest road".
An InReach Mini 2 will cost you $130/year more than a PLB over 10 years of ownership.
* Even he flubbed a parachuting emergency and nearly bought the farm. In fairness, so did my paratrooper grandfather as he busted 2 knees and his neck... he had to wear a neck support most of his life.
---
It's vital that PLBs be correctly registered and continually updated (2 years AND at every details change) with reliable emergency contacts who are always responsive. For multiple reasons, I would always call the one or more of PLB emergency contacts to let them know you're heading beyond cell service. US EPIRB operators register them here: https://beaconregistration.noaa.gov/RGDB/index
Terrestrial cell coverage is a function of population density much more than anything. In fact, I'd expect rural areas in the US and Candada to benefit from this just as much, if not more.
For an actual emergency beacon you don't need a subscription. ResQLink starts at $350 and the battery lasts 5 years before it needs to be replaced. No monthly fees.
Its more expensive up front, in time cash and effort, but amateur radio aprs beacons are free to use for amateur radio operators and there are enough satellites with repeaters to make it a viable option in terms of it working anywhere.
Which isn't a lot if it's something you use all the time. Of course, for a lot of people this sort of function makes it hard to justify a dedicated device and even a lower-tier subscription for very occasional use.
Because, as the FCC is likely to realize, once SpaceX (a US company) is acting as a common carrier for other service provider networks, they will end up being required to carry at reasonable cost and without deprioritization anyone who wishes to do business upon their network with customers, under equitable terms to (in this case) T-Mobile and others — just like the old copper-line DSL networks of the nineties. Space is a limited resource and SpaceX’s exclusive network will ensure a regulatory climate that Elon will loathe, and I expect be compelled under telecom law to accept and obey. I can’t wait to see it.
Happily, anyone could write the FCC and ask what their plans are regarding CLECs and SpaceX today — or, for example, ask questions like “Which US governing body regulates the SpaceX common carrier network?”. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/filing-informal-complai... is ready and waiting :)
To the degree this magical technology is available today (or soon) because of the profit motive, I sincerely hope you’re wrong. I want the promise of fabulous reward to drive what was science fiction only a couple decades ago.
God no, space is literally limited, one capital holder shouldn't be able to just run in their first, fuck everyone else over, and they say "nuh uh". If you're operating in any country you play by those countries rules, and in the US that is the agencies like the FTC.
It's ridiculous that you think anyone deserves to own the space around our planet
I find your strange glee about this rather off-putting. It’s like you’re actively interested in harming this really valuable new type of service in any way possible.
Given that, I find it hard to take at face value anything you’re saying and that it’s much more likely that you’re trying to mislead people.
Also space is even less of a “limited resource” than completely unpopulated areas of the Earth is or the entire ocean’s surface is. It’s three dimensional rather than two dimensional. Any single orbital altitude has more surface area than the entire earth.
Not quite your main point (which I agree with) but comparing surface area of orbits to the surface of the earth doesn't really help understand the carrying capacity of orbits.
There are so many constraints on objects in orbit, the degrees of freedom so limited, that carrying capacity is much smaller than you might suspect (though probably larger than our earth-bound intuition).
Just for starters, each item in orbit traces out a path (an orbit!) that can not intersect with the path of any other object, without carefully considering phasing to make sure there are no collisions.
We keep items separated by kms (hopefully!) because there is too much variation and uncertainty in orbits.
You can use different altitude shells to fit more items in, but they take longer to orbit and increase latency, so you have to be able to deal with that.
Based on degrees of freedom, orbits are far closer to 2 dimensional than 3 dimensional.
I was aware of all the points you made here before writing your post but hopefully I can help allay your concerns.
The Starlink constellation has already been described as being passively de-conflicted, meaning that, as designed, no Starlink satellite had to maneuver around any other Starlink satellite. The positional accuracy of the Starlink satellites is known by SpaceX to the precision of meters rather than kilometers. I’d need to dig it up the source again but Starlink satellites pass within kilometers of each other daily. Starlink already has over 1000 satellites at several of its altitudes.
While yes it’s true they have to avoid space debris with a wide berth I don’t really include that in the argument as that is a true statement no matter how many or how few satellites are in any given orbit.
It’s more a matter of poor control and poor altitude maintenance of other satellites. That’s a matter of regulation rather than a matter of an actually limited resource. For example Starlink currently uses 10km or 7km gaps between its shells but they vary in altitude significantly less than that and could be closer if allowed to be.
I agreee that SpaceX is unlikely to run into any issues with the number of satellites they are putting up, or coordinating those satellites.
However! It's disengenous to say land is 2d and orbits are 3d so there is more space in space. That
> space is even less of a “limited resource” than completely unpopulated areas of the Earth
Consider: how many Starlink constellations could reasonably be deployed in low earth orbit? Probably less than 1000, but maybe 10000-100000 (that would be a lot of satellites, but let's be generous).
Now how many Starlink constellations could be deployed in unpopulated areas of the Earth? Putting aside that they'd be useless, you could fit literally millions of constellations next to each other.
Space is big, but heavily constrained. One of the reasons something like an orbital ring would be so cool if we could get it to work - tons of space that is not constrained by orbital mechanics the same way free flying stations would be.
I used to be a DSL CLEC. I know from personal experience what kind of conversations, and regulatory interventions, it takes to get a monopoly incumbent common carrier (such as US West, or SpaceX) to lease their network at fair rates and to provide reasonable service for those rates. I am gleeful because the groundwork we laid down in the CLEC days continues to pay off decades later. That was a lot of very hard work.
I am all for innovating in carrier networks, and I’m all for charging for access through those networks — so in that, my motives and Starlink’s align! And since Starlink makes the same dollars per user whether the user is T-Mobile or a Local MVNO, I don’t see how innovation in their satellite network suffers in any way.
Wait... if your motives and those of Starlink are aligned, why would we even need CLEC regulation?
Surely that regulation forces the carrier to do something it otherwise wouldn't have (or it would be pointless), thereby suggesting a misalignment of incentives.
Starlink, a corporation, has additional motives available to it that are not aligned with either my own or with regulations:
To selectively partner with only the highest bidder, and to sell them exclusivity to increase that bid, and therefore maximize the profit earned from their monopoly.
The CLEC system was put into place to ensure that this sort of maximization wasn’t permitted on the copper networks that were owned by regional monopolies. Starlink has a regional monopoly on LEO satellite cellular right now, and so they’re subject to the same principles.
If Starlink was a B-corp, or a co-op, I wouldn’t be so certain this sort of thing would end up being necessary — but Starlink as a United States for-profit corporation is compelled to prioritize the profits over all other concerns, specifically including the quality and price of service offered to customers. So, the US regulations forcing non-exclusivity will absolutely be necessary — just as we found with US West’s copper in the CLEC era — and those inescapable US regulations are not in alignment with Starlink’s desires.
> Also space is even less of a “limited resource” than completely unpopulated areas of the Earth is or the entire ocean’s surface is.
The scarce resource here is globally-available L-band radio spectrum (potentially spatially multiplexed, if you have steerable beams on both ends, or only one satellite in view at a time and are using spot beams).
> It’s three dimensional rather than two dimensional. Any single orbital altitude has more surface area than the entire earth.
Space is three-dimensional, but lines-of-sight are two-dimensional. Even if you have steerable beams on both ends (which aren't that precise either, unless you're using laser beams), there's only so much non-overlapping sky above.
> ensure a regulatory climate that Elon will loathe
Why is that a data point and why are you convinced it will be true? I get that people somehow feel "betrayed" by the man, but this presenting this type of analysis taints the rest of your outlook.
Anyways.. he has the monopoly, he can set whatever price he wants. Common carrier doesn't mean you have to give it away at some imputed "commodity" price. I'm sure he'll find a way to make it work.
There's definitely a limit: Frequencies and orbital separation/steradians of aperture.
If you're putting a satellite right next to one of Starlink's, using the same frequency, how'd you communicate with it without the two interfering with each other?
Ah thank you. I’m assuming the product offering will be aimed at less frequent but more high value use cases such as remote navigation or sporadic messaging and infrequent short calls. Similar to other current satellite offerings for mobile devices, but hopefully enlarging the envelope of utility at least marginally.
"wherever you may be on land, lakes, or coastal waters"
I wonder why the limitation to coastal waters? They've been cracking down on offshore sailors using Starlink with the RV/Roaming plan, too. By all accounts it worked fine, but SpaceX wants to charge significantly more for an offshore plan.
There aren't any ground stations in the open ocean, so it all has to be routed between satellites to hop to one that has a connection to one. So it is a congestion issue.
It might well be a "dumb pipe" implementation (i.e. no regeneration and smart inter-satellite routing on the satellites), although Starlink does significantly mention an "onboard eNodeB modem", which sounds like it should be possible to forward that over the laser links.
Have they incorporated the laser links into prod on their sats yet? I thought that they were launching sats with them yet hadn’t successfully routed traffic yet through them in prod which is why they have a limitation to near the coast.
Yes, the open sea connections wouldn't work at all without them. But I think they're still a minority of the fleet and it'll take a while to eventually upgrade to full coverage.
I think it must be mostly a spectrum/licensing concern:
Neither T-Mobile nor Starlink own global frequencies in a suitable frequency band to offer offshore services.
That's one of the big benefits e.g. Apple gets out of the box for going with Globalstar, and Qualcomm for partnering with Iridium: They each own around 10 MHz of prime (i.e. L-band) global spectrum.
There is no global spectrum ownership, most countries regard radio waves as a national resource. ITU and related bodies only manage the standards not the allocation or ownership to operators.
What Globalstar, Iridium et al have agreements are agreements with wide array of countries but not all, for example India only allows Innmersat based devices , North Korea allows no one and so on.
OST does not cover radio frequency, only outer space( which is not well defined) ownership and activities, while the Bogota declaration failed to make progress for the equatorial countries at the UN, there are no major dispute on who owns the spectrum in the space above their national territories, most agree it is a national resource. Also to note there are many countries who are not signatories and/or not ratified the OST mostly in Africa.
Thank you for this context! Radio spectrum being considered a national resource actually makes a lot of sense. It also explains why Starlink's (residential) geographic availability map looks the way it does (i.e. corresponding to political borders).
Do you know if this is different for e.g. aviation applications or international waters? I also wonder whether Starlink (and other non-GEO operators) actually stop transmitting over countries where they don't have a license for their spectrum.
Nevertheless: Practically, Inmarsat, Globalstar, and Iridium do hold exactly these crucial L-band spectrum rights in almost all countries; Starlink doesn't yet.
In aviation, ICAO the governing body splits the globe into Flight Information Regions ( sub classified into ACCs) and delegates the management will have national member be responsible over international waters here is a list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_information_region
The national ICAO will "manage" practically used part of VHF and HF(pilots would use High Frequency over the ocean for greater propagation) and probably few other parts of the spectrum in this region they of course do not own the spectrum in that region.
Starlink and other communication satellites indeed will not transceive in a country without a license. In their case they transceive and not just transpond (broadcast). If any base station is attempting to connect to the satellite in a forbidden country by definition that is illegal and they will not acknowledge or open the connection.
This is why SpaceX is does not allow operations in disputed regions like Crimea, they do not want to be in position of recognizing sovereignty of disputed land for either Ukraine or Russia.
Related note: companies also don't want their civilian tech used for military applications, reason why DJI doesn't want their drones sold to either Russia or Ukraine. If they start getting classified as dual use by countries, they will be subject to export controls, sanctions etc.
This is a fascinating take. Cell phone adoption could push SpaceX into establishing a global spectrum committee. Let's hope they remember to register under the .INT domain
Well, that global spectrum committee already exists [1], .int domain and all :)
But somebody recently mentioned here that in order to provide satellite services in a given country, you still need a local license...?
I'm not sure how existing mobile satellite service providers fit in here – do Inmarsat, Iridium etc. just have a license in (almost) all countries worldwide?
Not all but a lot. It is a mixed bag though, Iridium and Thuraya are illegal in India but Inmarsat has a license, so it kind of depends really.
You need a local license because radio frequency is considered a national resource, so each country owns the radio space about its land and they get to govern it.
That makes sense. So the ITU has more of a role of coordination than of actual assignment, I suppose?
Practically, satellites won't switch frequencies every time their spot beam footprints cross national boundaries, so I suppose it's more of a matter of allowing/not allowing service in a given country (as determined by either the mobile or the satellite?).
The other tool is simply not allowing receivers to sold or used to decode/decrypt forbidden sources in a country enforced with import ban like with satellite phones etc.
That's news to me! Does ITU have any ability to mandate laws for the physical spectrum? If not, a global communications committee would still be needed. At minimum, they would need the ability to control the 5G blocks of every country participating in the SAT to cell service.
Like most of these international committees, I believe they mostly facilitate agreements between sovereign states; I don't believe they have any legislative power themselves.
Maybe an analogy would be ICAO's (another "specialized agency of the UN") "Freedoms of the Air" [1] – they define the terminology, but it's still up to individual (or blocs of) nation states to actually grant them to each other, ratify recommendations etc.
I think it's a spectrum cost issue or a coordination issue. LTE spectrum is eye wateringly expensive, but maybe more affordable places where it's not possible to put a mast!
It's either that, or whatever the logistics are around the cell boundaries.
Can anyone explain this from an RF/networking perspective? What frequencies does this operate at? How well matched are the antennas in most phones? How much more power are you using to be able to do this? What kind of modulation are you using for TX/RX?
This is doable only by Starlink because they're so low. They'll have very high gain antennas on the satellite - all satellite telephony needs that, these ones are presumably extra good.
I'm more interested in Doppler and timing advance. There's only limited Doppler correction in LTE - the satellites must be compensating for it. Although actually, I suppose they're mostly moving perpendicular to the direction of signal.
I'm particularly curious about TX - it's really impressive that a satellite would be able to pick out a signal coming from the tiny thing I'm holding in my hand.
It works for existing satellite messengers, and some of these are smaller and lighter than typical smartphones – and some even talk to geostationary satellites. These are almost 36000 km further away than your typical cell tower!
It’s all a question of data rates, transmit power, encoding, and (mostly in the geostationary case) large antennas on the satellite end.
> Direct to Cell works with existing LTE phones wherever you can see the sky. No changes to hardware, firmware, or special apps are required, providing seamless access to text, voice, and data.
It's also notable that this service isn't available yet, it starts (optimistically) sometime in 2024, probably very late 2024.
Everything regarding Starlink's plans would be speculation at this point, but we can look at existing comparable LEO satellite-to-mobile services, i.e. Globalstar and Iridium.
There, the answers are:
> What frequencies does this operate at?
1-2 GHz. These are also common terrestrial mobile communication frequencies.
> How well matched are the antennas in most phones?
That I don't know for Iridium (I think they're at least somewhat specialized), but for Globalstar, Apple is able to pull it off with their newer iPhones.
> How much more power are you using to be able to do this?
Iridium uses around 1-2 W – that's significantly more than LTE (I believe most devices only use about 125 mW, but I wasn't able to find precise numbers), but about the same as GSM/2G, which current phones largely still support (although I'm not sure whether they use that much transmit power practically still).
They used to launch 60 satellites per launch, now they launch 21. I'm guessing this hardware is a big part of the reason why. It needs a folding antenna much larger than the ones used for the broadband service.
This phone texting support hardware is tiny compared to the size and weight increase the v2 sats took on for their primary mission, broadband capacity, which went from from about 20 Gbps per bird in the v1 config to as much as (estimated) 80-100 Gbps per sat in this v2(mini) config. It was this increase that made the sats that much heavier and cut the total number per launch about in half.
The hardware for this, is as far as we know, not on any of the currently flying satellites. They were explicitly downsized to fit on Falcon 9 and thusly named "v2 mini". Most likely the major thing stripped off was the large folding antenna that would be required for cell phone signal.
The move from 60 to 22 (or 21) satellites was to maximize the normal Starlink service on the satellites. (21 are on board when launched from the west coast and 22 are on board when launched from the east coast.)
There was an article recently saying that they'd be testing the service in December [1]. I would've taken that to mean that the hardware is up there and just undergoing preparation, but this is SpaceX, they launch like every 4 days, I guess they very well can have not launched the ones with this functionality yet.
Search for "December" in the text. Unless you're referring to the bit about if the satellites are already up there, which is just my own thoughts rather than a statement of fact.
Okay I see that now, but I think that's referring back to earlier in the article where it says:
> The companies had targeted beta trials at the end of this year following the launch of Starlink V2 satellites, according to CNET.
Which also contains a link to an article from 2022 that was published during the original announcement of the T-Mobile partnership. However those satellites didn't get launched because of the delays of Starship.
LEO-to-mobile use cases don't usually need a reflector dish: Iridium and Globalstar don't have one either. That's more of a feature of GEO-to-mobile (e.g. Inmarsat, Thuraya, Skyterra etc.)
They do, these days: The iPhone 14 and above can use Globalstar for bidirectional text messaging (for emergencies only for now), and Qualcomm has announced something similar for Iridium.
Other devices they do communicate with (for text messaging) are also cell phone sized or smaller and don't have external antennas.
As you know, the recent iPhones have special hardware modifications to enable that communication on different frequency bands, with significantly higher transmit power and lower data rates than regular unmodified cell phones, which is what determine the necessary antenna size.
> As you know, the recent iPhones have special hardware modifications [...] with significantly higher transmit power [...]
I don't know that – do you, and if so, from where?
But what I do know is that it's possible for very small devices to directly talk to LEO and even geostationary satellites with transmit powers comparable to terrestrial applications.
L-Band is used exclusively for the satellite uplink. The power is significantly more than the majority of LTE/5G bands, but I see it's not the highest, actually that crown goes to GSM. Interesting. Seems like the much bigger reason that they don't need a large antenna is the other factor I mentioned, data rate, which is extremely low, while Starlink is targeting 2-4 Mbps. Plus there's the requirement to point the phone at the sky, while Starlink has stated that their service won't require that and should work from a pocket or inside a car. SpaceX has also specifically described the required satellite antennas as "really quite big".
Also, I'm not suggesting that the antenna is a "reflector dish" as you specified. It's a phased array, just much larger than the ones on previous Starlink satellites.
Oh, thank you for that link! I’ve been struggling to find exactly that FCC filing :)
I’m not surprised that GSM uses higher transmit power than Iridium/Globalstar actually – GSM phones were basically portable microwave ovens compared with modern mobile radio technologies.
But if you look at the table closely, the 5G C-band frequencies have even higher power outputs than Globalstar/L-band too! That's presumably because they are so wide, though (channels in band n77/n78 can be up to 100 MHz wide; compared to > 2W for 0.2 MHz wide channels for GSM, that's nothing).
Also, for bidirectional communications path losses are usually symmetric, and since satellites are usually severely power-limited compared to terrestrial base stations, blasting dozens of watts of transmit power from the mobile device wouldn't help with receiving the satellite's response.
> Also, I'm not suggesting that the antenna is a "reflector dish" as you specified.
Ah, I misunderstood then; I thought that's what you meant by "foldable antenna". I thought phased arrays are mostly solid-state (at least they are on comparable last-gen LEO satellites). But it makes sense for Starlink to do that; every bit of antenna aperture presumably helps when trying to talk to unmodified 4G mobile devices from space.
The iPhone 14 and above are not "unmodified". They have new specific hardware on them, otherwise Globalstar would work with the iPhone 13 and all Android phones.
"Direct to Cell works with existing LTE phones wherever you can see the sky. No changes to hardware, firmware, or special apps are required, providing seamless access to text, voice, and data."
"Starlink satellites with Direct to Cell capability have an advanced eNodeB modem onboard that acts like a cellphone tower in space, allowing network integration similar to a standard roaming partner."
This might just be a misunderstanding. I believe Loon is still owned by Google X, which changed its name to X Development and sometimes just calls itself X. Then of course you have the unrelated Musk company also called X.
Not a misunderstanding, mostly rumors [1]. When Loon shut down [2], they made a non-assertion pledge for roughly 200 patents originated during the project's lifetime [3]. Part of the platform was an LTE stack [4], and those patents aren't in the non-assertion pledge. The interesting bit is:
> To support ongoing innovation in the High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) communications industry, Loon transferred a number of stratospheric ballooning and networking patents to partners working in similar fields.
Hard to say for certain of course without any public records with regards to an IP transaction or patent/FCC filings showing the transfer of patent assignees. Google and Fidelity invested $1B in SpaceX previously (2015), which leads us to the thesis that Loon died because of Starlink.
I think believing random comments off of hacker news without verification or source makes questionable sense. The name "X" isn't unique (which is part of the problem with it) as you're exactly discovering.
I'm very curious how this will work on a technical level.
My estimate is that (at least initially) it won't be actual texting (i.e. SMS) – unmodified LTE and 5G seem way too verbose to be able to handle the constraints of a much higher number of devices per base station, combined with the significantly higher transmission delay and free space path loss.
One of the IoT spinoff standards of LTE and 5G seem much more plausible candidates – they are built with very similar constraints (extremely low received signal strengths, many devices per base station etc.) and are already being successfully used for satellite applications. I've been testing one device using geostationary satellites myself.
But that would require updates to both the baseband firmware and OS of current or future phones (if not entirely new basebands!), and at that point it's going to be very interesting to see whether Apple (accounting for a very large share of the US market) will play along with that or rather push their own (Globalstar-based) satellite solution.
unmodified LTE and 5G seem way too verbose to be able to handle the constraints of a much higher number of devices per base station
That's a matter of pricing, isn't it?
Also, won't this primarily be used where very few people roam? Otherwise they could just use the regular land-based LTE infra.
Remember: SpaceX can't just magically offer cheaper mobile coverage globally; they don't own any rights to use 4G/5G frequency bands. These are typically very expensive.
It makes a lot of sense for SpaceX to partner with mobile operators who own these rights but don't utilize them very well in sparsely inhabited areas.
Not necessarily: Users don't pay for signalling traffic.
I could imagine even just rejecting attachment requests of thousands of roaming clients could easily saturate a single satellite cell. Existing mobile-to-satellite protocols are much more optimized in that regard (and limited in that there are simply not that many clients out there looking for signal).
Sure, but ignoring doesn't solve the problem of signalling channel saturation – if there is something to ignore, it means that some scarce resource has already been consumed.
That's fine if you need to tell a few terrestrial clients to go away every few minutes or so (until they finally give up until the next reboot or so), but I could imagine it being much more tricky when you're talking about cell sizes with a diameter of hundreds of kilometers.
> wouldn't this primarily be activated in very desolate areas?
It would be enabled globally (to fill in coverage gaps etc), I'd assume – and even in very remote areas, you might easily have a sizeable number of devices per square kilometer. A typical cell size (for Iridum, as an example) is 250 miles of diameter – that's the area of New York state! And that's not even considering overlaps of remote and densely populated areas.
To summarize (please correct me if I'm wrong here):
You see this being deployed to service every customer of the partnering mobile networks, wherever they may be.
I see this being deployed to service those customers who aren't covered by existing and much cheaper land-based LTE-coverage from the partnering mobile networks.
My concern is really of a more technical nature: 2G-5G are somewhat "chatty" on their signalling channels, as far as I understand.
Even when a given network does not support your operator/SIM card, your device will attempt to connect to it at least once (and hopefully cache the resulting rejection permanently and not keep trying in a loop).
But in case your device does support the satellite-based service (e.g. as a T-Mobile customer in the US), it would then attach to the satellite network if no terrestrial service is available and send periodic location updates etc.
That's normally not a problem, since cell sizes on earth are limited (either by geometry/physics or intentionally by network capacity planning), and by extension also the ratio of signalling chatter per cell.
I'm just not sure if unmodified LTE clients can be convinced to be less chatty only from the network side.
Why wouldn't it use or support plain SMS? The satellites are emulating cell towers to be able to talk to existing modems in existing phones, and SMS is one of the most barebones things you get "for free" when you have a functioning connection before voice or data are even on the table.
The link budget, latency, and number of devices per cell/spot beam are significantly different for satellite applications and have so far required adapted protocols.
These are all not huge adaptations, and the hardware (antennas, LNAs, power amplifiers etc) of modern phones are definitely capable of it, but this entire endeavour is so much easier if you can just slightly adapt the cell phone side of things as well.
5G has made these adaptations (for both NB-IoT and "regular" 5G, i.e. NR); I'm just somewhat doubtful Starlink will be able to deliver the same for completely unmodified 4G/LTE.
It is, and I assume that that' what they'll end up using.
So they might end up technically meeting their target of "unmodified current devices" being able to use this, given that Samsung announced they'll be integrating 5G NTN IoT into some of their devices – but I highly doubt it would work with regular old (broadband) LTE or 5G phones.
They haven't announced one. My guess is that they're in the middle of complicated negotiations with cell operators at this point.
They certainly seem to have big ambitions for this project – they've supposedly secured 85% of Globalstar's bandwidth [1], and I doubt that calling for ambulances or tow trucks, or users sharing their location manually (once per 15 minutes at monst) requires that much.
My guess is that iMessage over satellite will become part of some of their higher-tier iCloud plans, in line with Apple's "services" ambitions and as a way to test the waters of providing network access directly.
GP is (I believe) replying to an iPhone-specific remark in my original comment.
I've brought up Apple/Globalstar because it serves as a baseline for what's already possible, as well as it being a likely future competitor.
And I wouldn't read too much into (in)compatibility at this point: Neither Starlink nor Apple have disclosed how their respective solutions actually work. Starlink might function as a "dumb pipe" analog frequency-shifting relay just like Globalstar.
The page then stated regarding LTE bandwidth: "We will provide 2-4mbps download or uplink per beam. [...] Each beam will cover a 50km diameter on the ground."
Global connectivity is amazing but a part of me has this feeling of losing something. It will be no longer possible to be away from everything unless you seek it actively. Overall it’s a good thing but it still makes me sad in a particular way that I don’t have a word to describe it.
Exactly, and likely the availability/affordability of nutritious food as well.
And to loop the analogy back – I don't think ubiquitous network reachability is ultimately a big problem; it's what we do with it: Social expectations around constant availability to respond, addictive/heavily gamified applications, etc.
"Personal failing" has idiomatic meaning, it specifically refers to things which are that person's fault. Medical issues generally don't count as "personal failings". If you did something wrong that caused a medical problem, that could be a personal failing. For instance if your organ failed because you drove your motorcycle too fast and crashed, that could be described as a personal failing.
When I was much younger I also felt a profound sense of loss when I found that the Iridium constellation covered the globe.
Thankfully our shared thought that you can't be away from everything is not true: caves, anything underwater or dense forests around the world are totally inaccessible for any satellite devices.
Also, not sure if you've used any satellite devices but even in most conditions you're still pretty away from things. You have to set up the device with a view of the open sky and wait several minutes for a text-only message of a handful of bytes. Using it in a Costa Rican rainforest was almost impossible.
Things have shifted though. I took multi-week international trips in the 90s where no one expected to be able to reach me (especially not easily) and certainly not as a matter of routine communication. Maybe I'd send a postcard.
A lot of people today expect that most travel maintains some degree of connectivity back home, especially if something urgent/serious happens.
Implicitly, maybe. However, being disconnected is usually just a perk of getting away.
The problem with getting disconnected is that we don’t want to do it, we are afraid of missing out and we usually invent other activities to rationalize it.
In a sense it’s a bit like enjoying the radio in traffic, taking the long ride home after work. This is not something that you would rationally do unless you have to, but there are some benefits that people are still seeking from it.
If you must for emergencies, bring it turned off locked away, and promise yourself you will only take it out in an emergency. But then you didn't need one for emergencies before it was possible, so I'd argue you still don't need one.
> But then you didn't need one for emergencies before it was possible, so I'd argue you still don't need one.
No, people didn't have phones, satellite messengers etc. Nor did we have penicillin or water filters, and as a result, people sometimes died from (by today's measure) trivially preventable causes.
So that's not a very good argument for not bringing a phone or satellite beacon/messenger on a hike – permanently connected and livestreaming, turned off and at the bottom of your backpack, or anything in between. The choice is all yours!
That would be irrational, the trick of going somewhere far away is that you rationalize it through something else and you don’t have the option to have the Internet or the phone.
No one goes somewhere far away, explicitly for being disconnected, that’s an implicit goal.
Otherwise, you can just turn off your phone do I have to leave it.
so, uh, I lived in the Yukon for 4 years and have spent months in the Arctic Circle and all over AK and Yukon. I drove from Alaska to Argentina, I drove right around Africa and I drove around Australia, including the world's most remote 4x4 track - 1,050 miles in ten days without seeing another person or vehicle.
I, umm, know a thing or two about going remote without communications.
Don't worry. We will normalize intentful disconnecting for periods of time out of necessity. It's far too obvious that being hyper connected 24/7 is bad for our health. We won't all be addicted to digital cigarettes forever.
Being hyper connected 24/7 isn’t bad for health. Overuse of corporate, censored, algorithmic agenda social media is bad for health. It’s not the L3 connectivity or texts from loved ones that harms us.
I used an account on one of the uncensored non-algorithmic mastodon sites for a bit. I saw that I don't really want uncensored streamed content (and I cleared my browser cache afterwards).
The human brain is not designed to handle that and is entirely abstract from normal pre-internet situations. Normal experience is low bandwidth input of mostly known self-reinforcing stimulus. A signal that's approximately analogous to 100% noise screamed at 120db does not improve the human condition. It just leads to mental breakdown and psychotic episodes.
Carefully filtered bias-reinforcing echo chambers are actually a good thing and are what we should be living the majority of our lives in. Having the option to not do that is a good thing, but it should not be the norm.
Libraries are not raw unfiltered samples of everyone's brains. They're carefully filtered and curated to provide maximal learning ability (with quiet environments to reduce distraction to allow focused learning).
Right, constant streams of unfiltered random content, uncorrelated with our intentions, are not what we evolved for.
We are also not evolved to handle constant streams of highly curated content, harnessing the psychology of addiction, leveraging our individual interests (conscious or subconscious) to advance other’s economic interests.
What we need: content curated by our chosen specified interests and quality bars, however refined we wish those too be, and completely agnostic otherwise.
Yes you can! It's just that you never seem to want to, even though you regret wasting the day when you put your head to your pillow.
Stop treating human brains like all-capable, all-rational, all-free-willed things. Stop treating any technology as a neutral tool. It's disgusting and harming.
Project much? Like teetotalers claiming that one drop of booze turns decent men into degenerates, it says more about the complainer than the subject of his ire.
> We won't all be addicted to digital cigarettes forever.
Yeah we will. Why wouldn't we?
> It’s not the L3 connectivity or texts from loved ones that harms us.
Yeah it is. The fact that you feel you need to "announce" yourself real time is depressing. Can you not deal with being away from your loved one. Are you that clingy that you need to be in touch 24/7? Or is it trust issues?
"Hi hun; love you, ill be back in a few days" does wonders for a relationship.
What's wrong of explaining your vacation after you touch base?
Agree with your comment on L3. The only exception I will make is communication in true life/death scenarios. Even then I understand the desire for some to intentionally disconnect that too.
>> We won't all be addicted to digital cigarettes forever.
>Yeah we will. Why wouldn't we?
That's why I called them cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes used to be ubiquitous. We have dramatically reduced smoking and it's now more normal to not be addicted to cigarettes.
As we better understand how things negatively impact our health we gradually adjust our behavior. This makes sense from both a natural selection stand point and by simply observing consistent advancement in healthcare.
I don't claim it will go away entirely but it will be more socially acceptable to disconnect from the bad parts and you'll have better tools and support to do so.
> Yeah it is. The fact that you feel you need to "announce" yourself real time is depressing. Can you not deal with being away from your loved one. Are you that clingy that you need to be in touch 24/7? Or is it trust issues?
These all sound more like L8 problems, to be honest.
Certain communities will, but it requires people have a third place to pick up good habits. Eg you probably won’t disconnect per a work goal, but Catholic groups have already instituted digital Lents for almost a decade already.
What is the approximate value of Google's investment in SpaceX now? Would Google have to disclose if it bought more stake or sold any of its original stake?
It looks like they invested via convertible bonds -- you can see the appreciation via the "Non-Marketable Debt Securities" line in their financial statements.
It was about $1b in 2015 after they made the investment - if you ignore other little sales/purchases, it had increased to $1.8 billion in 2017.
They then note "During the year ended December 31, 2018, the terms of a non-marketable debt security were modified resulting in an unrealized $1.3 billion gain" and then the balance sheet shows a non-marketable equity security, so they must have converted at that point. The value increased by $4 billion in 2018 and another $3 billion in 2019 -- though both include other investments they'd made in private companies.
By 2022, they had a total of $12 billion in unrealized gains in that category.. The majority of that is likely SpaceX so probably at minimum 10x'ed their investment?
This is exciting! My family has an off-the-grid cabin which has weak LTE service. Using Starlink is possible (and other people in the area use it) but the power demands are quite high. I was going to first try a 4g antenna hooked up to a local hotspot, but this might give us other options. It's a little unclear how it works from this info - hopefully they have a version that individuals can stand up if there's no network operator in their area.
I'd be very, very surprised if it got anything more than 1 kbps in the next couple of years. Very likely much less (think several seconds to send a single SMS-length message).
That's how much Iridium and Globalstar (the two existing comparable LEO solutions) can do without large external antennas for current satellite messengers (Garmin InReach, SPOT, more recently Apple iPhones etc.)
Actually using 1-2 Mbps will likely remain unaffordable for a while even once it becomes possible, given the cell sizes and frequencies involved.
Starlink is much cheaper than that because it uses the Ka-band (which has tens to hundreds of times more bandwidth available for this application) and directional beams on both ends of the connection, vastly increasing spatial reuse.
This was the number I was remembering, which was "two to four megabits per cell zone" so definitely not _per device_ (unless you are in a lonely cell).
For Iridium (which also uses LEO satellites and spot beams), the typical cell size is tens of thousands of square miles, though!
Even if Starlink manages to provide much smaller cells (which is not trivial, especially with omnidirectional mobile devices as clients instead of phased-array dishes), we're talking several orders of magnitudes compared to a regular terrestrial cell.
We don't have "off-the-grid" cabins in the UK as much as I love one. To think you want to carry connectivity to somewhere remote where you could idle with nature is terrible.
You should be asking why do you need such a service.
With respect, I'd urge you to think about what you are saying.
Most people who visit this cabin do want to turn off their devices. That's the goal. When the cabin was built, we lived in a reasonable world where being un-contactable for a week was common. That world is dead.
We need reliable connectivity because without it many people could not travel to the cabin at all. They don't have the power to change the world they live in or their position in it. They may need to take a zoom meeting or respond to an email.
Instead of impertinently implying I am not aware of the downsides of this state of affairs I encourage you to articulate what you mean in a way that doesn't talk down to people.
P.s. The Uk does indeed have "off grid" cabins![1]
I also hate it! But we live in a world where people are expected to have connectivity so right now those people simply cannot visit the cabin. If you are in the position to wind the connectivity clock back 50 years, please do.
This looks like the end of the road for Swarm. They are a small cube sat company that provides occasionally connected data packet connectivity globally. Space X bought them in 2021. The cofounder is now one of the main leaders of direct to cell.
How it works with totally unmodified cellular hardware? I thought there are physical max limits on cell size and they were lower than LEO orbits.
Could it in future allow for LTE speeds?
Could it work in any place where regular starlink could?(assuming SpaceX ignores licensing rules for countries who says it's their territory/it's high seas/they got license).
All I got to say is if this is realized, this will be game changing in terms of geopolitics, intelligence and economics. They said they partnered with local telecom providers, but the thing is they ideally don't need to.
I am not a member of a nation which is in very good relations with the nation of the company here (America), and for this sole reason I hate the centralization of power with progressing technology. Don't bother telling me X tech is actually decentralizing. Yes it probably is, yet please compare the modern world with 1000s to see the amount of centralization. In my country, in the case of a war, if Google Maps were to stop operating, many forms and a high percentage of the transportation and cargo delivery would grind to a halt. If Visa and Mastercard stop operating an even bigger chaos would immediately ensue.
Thank God we at least own the internet infrastructure.
Assuming reasonable affordability, when this becomes broadly available - would definitely use this as primary texting service in the backcountry but still bring Garmin Inreach Mini as back-up / emergency nav. The UI/UX for texting via Garmin's messenger app on iphone is very good...syncs contacts, etc. Limited to text vs. multimedia (assuming pictures would not be available until '25 via Starlink as part of 'data' launch?). As with all satellite services, connectivity comes/goes with Garmin - would expect the same for Starlink.
A real gamechanger for emergency/SAR situations would be if one could enable the Starlink service from an iPhone _while_ in the backcountry vs. needing to set it up a priori...many people realize they wish they had an InReach once bad things occur. Don't imagine that is possible today.
According to the Optus press release [1] this will a service Starlink sells to phone companies to extend their coverage. This is a big deal in Australia because 60% of the land mass still has no standard phone coverage. Telstra has the best rural phone coverage by far, so if you frequently go to the wilderness you use Telstra. If Starlink lives up to the promises, I suspect a lot of people will be switching from Telstra to Optus over the next few years.
Yes, but most areas under-served by ground based networks have very few people - so it'll be interesting to see how it works out. Even fewer Optus customers.
Strong doubts about voice service being useful, assuming 2-4mbps per 50 km diameter spot.
The point of cellular is frequency reuse. If your cell is huge that's one channel blocked for that entire area. You can't reuse the it within that area to serve more terminals with more bandwidth. So the system capacity will suck.
Number of simultaneous voice users would be limited to the capacity of a single channel for 2000 sqkm. Don't hope for much.
So what they used to need a pizza sized phased array antenna that draws 10 Amps for is now possible with existing hardware? A bit impossible to believe unless there's a major caveat. I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to get the signal to the ground, but how can the satellites receive anything from the phone?
Regardless, if this works then infinite range robotics with just a 4G modem is now possible. Anyone wanna fly a solar powered RC plane across the Atlantic? :P
They are basically putting an LTE cell tower on the satellites. This can be used for very low-bandwidth applications, starting with just text messages.
They are not providing 100MB+ broadband via this connection.
LTE supports a very wide range of bandwidths (0.2 MHz for NB-IoT up to multiples of 20 MHz for carrier aggregation) and modulation rates.
Given the transmit power constraints on both sides of satellite-to-mobile, Starlink/T-Mobile will most likely be targeting the extreme low end on both bandwidth and modulation rates.
The website says text messages in 2024, voice and data starting in 2025, and IoT in 2026.
So it seems they have had the same thought on the usefulness for remote telemetry data.
I don't know a lot about LTE signals but given the distances to the satellite and wide coverage area each satellite is responsible for it makes sense that performance is significantly diminished compared to your local cell tower.
There's only a few thousand satellites up in orbit right now. Maybe 4000-5000? Half of them are on the other side of the planet at any given time... The service is already strained in a lot of areas. It's not gonna be easy to give bandwidth to another few million phones.
Not just half, but most of them will be below the horizon at any point in time – their orbits are pretty low.
But since mobile phones don't really have directional antennas anyway (unlike Starlink terminals), having more than one satellite in sight above the horizon doesn't really help with capacity anyway. (You need steerable beams on both sides to make use of spatial multiplexing.)
The caveat is on the operator's side. Your satellites need to be much closer to the user, that means much less square miles of coverage per satellite, due to the Earth's curvature. So you need like 1000x more satellites compared to the 10 Amp antenna setup, but if you have an economically viable way of launching them, you're good to go.
You don't get to beat physics just by being in orbit. Transmitting from a cell phone at a distance of 500km (in the best case) versus less than a dozen for a cell tower still makes things difficult. This will never be competitive with even moderately dense cell tower deployments. It does however put a global floor on cell service and stops the need to build cell towers in almost uninhabited deserts, or on every mountain top to reach every narrow valley in the mountains.
Even mass produced, a "cell phone tower in space" is going to inherently be massively larger and more sensitive than a tower on Earth. It does however let providers/governments focus investment on where people are rather than needing to maintain very remote towers for the very few that use them.
If cost is of no concern you could build a network of satellites with similar performance to what is available on the ground, the cost will be eye watering however and a waste compared to building it on Earth. The “floor” I reference is in terms of the crossover point in cost versus the alternative. I don’t know where that precisely will be given it depends on the internal proprietary costs of the businesses in question.
That was tried before by Iridium (owned by Motorola). It was killed by local ground/mobile network operators based on unfair competition rules. In the end lots of countries demanded Iridium opened a local company and exchange. What makes Elon think he'll win this time?
How many simultaneous users can this tech support? I.e. how does it scale? (Per satellite?)
I’m also a little bit grossed out by all these competing satellite networks filling up LEO, and having to more or less continuously launch new satellites to replace the existing failing ones.
I look forward to this eliminating the need for the ground station, too, and just connecting directly to the user's carrier wherever it is in the world.
(Yes, there are politics involved there. That's part of why I look forward to that being bypassed.)
Overuse of the SOS feature for non-emergency situations, and false activations are already taxing Search-and-Rescue organizations. Starlink will make this MUCH worse. (Source: Accidents in North American Mountaineering 2023)
If commercial satellites can pick up individual cellphone signals and receive them with no modifications, the military would have this tech for years?
Just listening on where devices are currently and the signal power strength (must be higher while calling/transmitting data) could be a major source of signal intelligence.
Not necessarily, starlink satellite and receiver are the cutting edge technology. Raytheon may have this technology years ago in their skunkwork equivalent but the military never formally bought anything like that.
Military doesn't need same quality to monitor, Starlink needs to also transmit and receive data(albeit slow speed), a military sat would just need to listen for a signal and know active and possibly identify some characteristics which combined other data sources Signal Int will have access to could be used to uniquely identify.
Starlink satellites are designed to be cheap(<$1M) and small in weight (~1,000Kg) and size(fit 20-60 in Falcon 9), and lot of the innovation is manufacturing at scale.
I am skeptical they come anywhere close to purpose built military satellites which costs upwards of $300-$400M[1] and are much larger in weight (5,000Kg-10,000+) and size (use full fairing ) and fly DH, Atlas as well and lever vertical integration. Given what we know about KH-11s, Trump photo tweet, the tech in the donated mirrors etc Military seem generation ahead in production tech not just experimental ones.
[1] There is some pork for sure in all government contracts, but not $299M worth.
T-Mobile is forcing all of it's unlimited data plan users to more expensive plans without a choice under the justification that it's part of the Sprint merger.
AST has one very large satellite, so it supports higher bandwidth for each device, giving them 18Mbps speed. Starlink satellites, even with gen 2, are smaller but more numerous. So while AST may support 40 simultanuous callers and sell the service to 40000 customers, starlink direct to cell gives you lower bandwidth but can support 40000 simulatnuous callers and sell to 4M people. (numbers are my best guesses)
This is what “6G” wireless is like. Lack of coverage is holding back wireless applications more than anything else and it does not matter at all if any other attributes of performance improve if nothing is done about coverage. And this is the only way to do it unless people invent gravity wave, neutrino or axion radio.
In the USA at least, it's not legal for a passenger of a plane to use cell radios at all. That's apart from the signal being blocked by the plane's metal hull unless perhaps you're holding your device up to a window.
So at least for now, you're stuck with their overpriced wifi.
Is there any company even remotely close to competing with Starlink in the "global satellite ISP" space?
I remember reading somewhere that literally most of the satellites orbiting earth are Starlink satellites. As in, more than half of all satellites are Starlink.
Obviously that statistic does not mean they have a successful business, that there's enough of a market, etc etc.
But one can imagine the types of services you can supply in just a few years to customers when you have by far the largest satellite constellation in the sky, with global coverage, and the ability to launch dozens of new satellites at low cost.
Other providers are in the works, but they don't work as fast as Starlink and don't have their own rockets to launch them in. Which is good. BlueWalker 3, a prototype for a new internet satellite provider, is brighter than 99.8% of all stars visible from Earth. They're planning on launching 70 more of them.
There are about 5,000 Starlink satellites and about 8,000 satellites total. For the past few years, the number of satellites has been increasing by 30% every year. Starlink can launch 50 satellites in each Falcon 9, which can fly every week. Eventually Starlink will have about 42,000 satellites in orbit. Other mega satellite networks are being planned which could raise the total to over 400,000 satellites.
They can have millions, they don't plan to have more than 12k up at the same time. 40k is the estimated cumulative number for the currently planned lifecycle
Not sure about overall prospects for successful business, but current revenue is a lot higher than I realized:
> The Wall Street Journal reports that Starlink's revenue for 2022 was $1.4 billion, up from $222 million in 2021. It is not known how much profit or loss the division made, but SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in February that Starlink is expected to turn a profit this year.
Everyone in my neighborhood pays $120/month for it, myself included. It was an absolute game changer. Honestly I think most people in my neighborhood would pay even more for it. It's so much better than the options it replaced. I don't think many people understand how frustrating it is to live in a slightly rural area without good internet options, so many of these areas have been ignored by normal ISP's for forever.
The most likely competitor is Kuiper but they're way behind. There's also OneWeb but they've had a lot of business issues. They're not selling service direct to consumers AFAIK. China is planning a constellation but I don't know much about it and I would never use an ISP from China in any case.
SpaceX's reusable rockets give them kind of an insurmountable launch cost advantage for now, and also for the foreseeable future assuming Starship achieves second stage reusability.
Both comments that you've made in this story have been horribly off the mark. The reason for reusable rockets is: they're cheaper than non-reusable rockets. As a result, no one can compete with SpaceX's pricing. And that other comment where you implied that SpaceX doesn't have much of a target market only demonstrates that you have no idea what the quality of internet service is outside of metropolitan areas or how many people live in those areas.
Oh, I know quite well how bad internet and mobile coverage can be outside metropolitan areas. All those areas so, well the vast majority, can be supported by terrestrial internet using either 5G or fibre. SpaceX has thus to be cheaper than those terrestrial solutions in order to compete.
Markets where satelite based solution are the only option include maritime, desaster areas, aviation and remote areas without inhabitants. Everything else, Starlink competes with, e.g., 5G. Just how competitive Starlink is, nobody outside SpaceX knows for a lack financial data. And since the use of reusable rockets only got traction when SpaceX created in-house demand for them, well, I am sceptical regarding the economic viability of it.
As I said, it can be typical Musk goal post moving, a viable business idea or a combination of those two. And by the way, Uber was cheaper than Taxis for a long time by selling a dollar for cents, and the same as Uber SpaceX has access to capital other ISPs just don't have. Doesn't mean SpaceX ia serving a market, remote areas, existing ISP are neglecting for decades by now.
I've seen people claim SpaceX is charging too much. Now you're claiming they are subsidizing launch i.e dumping to keep other launch competitors out.
In parts of Asia and Africa where SpaceX operates, they match or beat prices of competitors today. And of course they beat other sat competitors on pricing.
In the US there's parts of cities and suburbs where wired service is available but unreliable or hard capped with overages.
Reusability helps with reliability. Also allegedly helps with cost and cadence.
Kind of yes, kind of no. As with everything, their prices are a mix calculation. Meaning they charge what they can, with mass LEO launches being cheaper than high orbit scientific and government stuff. What SpaceX does in my opinion is subsidizing LEO launches using reusable rockets with Starlink launches.
You seem to completely underestimate how expensive it is to install fiber across say, the entire midwest, and completely overestimate the quality of 5G coverage/investment in the same area.
The question is not if there are competitors in the "satelite ISP" space, but rather how Starlink compares to other ISPs. Reason being that the market where Starlink, or satelite communications in general, have a unique selling point is rather small, especially compared to the global communications market.
We'll see, so far I think Starlink is SpaceX's way to keep investor money flowing, valuations high and the point of general profitability (pinky promise) in the future without raising any eye brows.
Iridium and Globalstar are in this space. As I understand it, the cost is much higher, and the data rates are much lower.
Hughesnet, Viasat and others offer internet services via satellite from geostationary orbits, and may not offer global coverage; similarish costs, lower data caps (as I understand it), and much higher latency. Mostly targeted for fixed location broadband connectivity, where there's no terrestrial option (because almost all terrestrial options are better in all dimensions)
Clearly rural broadband has a reasonable market. Focusing specifically on cellular phones: my iPhone lets me send emergency SOS messages via satellite and doesn't use Starlink. This means that at least the "emergency calling when out of cellular range" piece of the market has competitors (and they're cheap enough that Apple can include two years of service in my phone's price.) I'm not sure how big the discretionary texting/calling/browsing-while-out-of-cellular service market is.
By Itanium effect if anything, because AST at least has actually demonstrated the technology. Musk is just setting up a website and he already hits HN frontpage...
Somewhat? The build quality of a Tesla, even a Model S, resembles that of a Corolla at best. The dash creaks, there's unexplained rattles, the wind howls if things aren't sealed properly, and if you try to address anything with a Service Center you often get told 1) they can't find it, or 2) they found it, but it's "within spec".
I'm more of referring to materials, although later generation (Y and 3) seem to be using softer plastics tho some rattles are still there. I haven't driven Corolla for a while, but compared to decade old Mazda - only real leather is what I miss, else it's like every car 3 decades before.
The tech behind this is great, but I fear what the TV makers will do with this to prevent you from disabling ads. Samsung is bad enough as is, having a built in connection will make it even worse.
I rented an old house for a few years that had lath and plaster walls, but they stapled chicken wire to the lath prior to adding the plaster. It made for a decent faraday cage. I had to stand by a window to get cell service. Wifi would not propagate between rooms, so I had to setup a mesh system with individual ethernet connections. I miss it.
I think you are describing expanded metal. This was definitely twisted wires. I had a heck of a time cutting in the boxes for the ethernet. It was built in 1905, and some flipper at some point decided to leave the lath and plaster and just add lath and drywall overtop. Presumably the same person put a metal roof over the old composite shingles and vinyl siding over the wood. They also chose to not add insulation. Always get an inspection before you buy!
And this will almost certainly be more expensive than plain old cellular. TV manufacturers would be covering a very niche market of people who have a TV in a location with no cellular coverage.
But I believe it's uneconomical more for licensing reasons than BOM reasons. Cellular baseband modems are an oligopoly, and so they attach all sorts of rev-share fees to use of their chips, beyond just the cost of the chip itself.
Apple actually owns the baseband/modem group they bought from Intel a couple of years ago. The 11 and 11 Pro were shipped with in-house ex-Intel modems. Since then they have moved back to Qualcomm but I have to imagine they're continuing development and will cut Qualcomm out one day. [1]
Yup, there are guides for how to open up your new TV and remove/disable the M2M modem inside. I don't think the cellular connection being in the sky will change too much about that.
Ahh, so the blocker is his companny lying to the feds about environmmental damanage and assessments. And I bet it will communicate with his "piece of shit"[0] solar shingles.
He is a charlatan piping away an entrancing tune to many gullible fools.
I'm doubtful whether it's a good idea to give a private company like Starlink so much power over our communication in general. Why should they have the satellites for such a network? Wouldn't it be better that something crucial as this is publicly owned? Just thinking about the incident when Starlink cut access for Ukraine in fear their use of Starlink might trigger an atomic war. Why should one business person be able to make such a decision?
Stuff like this has existed from companies like garmin for some time. This is very cool, though.
Here is when this was announced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzli-Ww26Qs
Pretty cool! Also kindof funny to see the TMobile CEO trying to hype people up and Elon sortof reigning it in.