Well dang. That's a really good point. I remember early cell phones that would drop signal when running between towers.

The hard part here is that you have to target the beam at the satellite. It's not a wide angle beam that's used it's a focused beam. (This might not be true based on what they implement)

But for Geo it's a targeted beam. So this isn't a perfect corollary, and my example was pretty bad lol.

Geo satellites also do beamforming. See epic ng or quantum.

Satellites shooting lasers to talk to each other and create a global network in space is not a new problem?

Damn, I guess we ran out of interesting problems to solve then /s.

>My cellphone (republic) switches from WiFi to cellular network mid-call if I'm on it when I leave a building. This is not a new problem.

Networking technology switching is unrelated to a call, which always uses cellular.

my cellular provider (T-Mobile) uses UMA/GAN to switch between wifi enabled cellular network access and cellular network access proper on the fly

Republic specifically does this; it's their whole marketing gimmick. You pay a low amount for a modest data cap, but the phone seamlessly prioritizes WiFi networks when available.

I've been using them for years and it works fine.

Not sure about republic, but many phones implement WiFi calling.

His network probably allows Wi-Fi calling and text messaging. So it would be switching.