The facts are:

1. The iPhone 13 will have a new chip

2. The new chip is capable of additional bands licensed by Globalstar

3. Globalstar happens to be a satellite company.

Media thinks iPhone 13 can talk to satellites, when what it can really talk to is new 5G bands licensed by Globalstar.

Also see https://twitter.com/saschasegan/status/1432156621690576900

Maybe it's more profitable for satcomm companies to just retire their fleet in general and relicense their spectrum to terrestrial wireless telcos.

I seriously seriously doubt it will be X60 and a half.

It will be X60 ( And if will have Touch ID ), does not support the band and it is as simple as that. And on the subject of Modem, I thought HN wanted Apple to get rid of Qualcomm?

> The most likely path forward, and the one that Globalstar proclaims themselves, is licensing this spectrum for use on a terrestrial basis.

So no, not clickbait. The conclusion of the article's author is that n53 band support is not for satellite connectivity but for terrestrial connections using that band.

Slightly off-topic, but I always wondered if Starlink could setup terrestrial links with the same equipment to create/augment suburban/urban capacity.

Just mount Dishy and it’ll point to that big tower/building downtown.

Could you do it cheaper with existing wifi gear? In theory, but then you need someone to mount and aim it. This would be grab and go almost.

It doesn't state that. "Apple is working on it longterm" doesn't mean "iPhone 13 will have".

Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but this article quotes directly from the bloomberg article about how the satellite service will be unreliable, needs a long time to connect, and will only be able to send short emergency messages.

Thats from bloomberg... do you really trust them with tech news?!

GPS doesn’t count as “internet”

Well. So. It's an interesting case.

This isn't for an upcoming iPhone model, but more of a future indication. COSPAS-SARSAT return link is a feature undergoing testing today.

COSPAS SARSAT basically means Search And Rescue Satellite in both Russian and English. It's the international space-based search and rescue system. Today some Global positioning satellites (including GPS) are part of this programme as MEOSAR (Medium Earth Orbit Search and Rescue), looking down if they see a suitable digital beacon signal they will remember and, when able to see a ground station, relay their estimate of the beacon position and the beacon message (which may include a truncated GPS position from the beacon). The beacon might be a relatively bulky component on a ship, a handheld but still cumbersome personal beacon, or even an oversize wristwatch from Breitling, the Breitling Emergency isn't exactly a dainty piece of wrist jewellery, but it's not bigger than an iPhone.

Today that's a one way system, you activate your beacon and rescuers know which beacon it was, and where you are, and hopefully they come rescue you.

But return link is an upgrade so that beacons can receive a message back in the other direction e.g. "We see you" (which at least means you know the beacon worked) or maybe some day "We see you. Rescue team on foot to you. Stay nearby" which further improves morale. We know morale is very important in serious accidents. GPS birds are equipped to transmit of course, that's the whole purpose of them, so this is a relatively reasonable upgrade for them.

Thus today you can't get anywhere close to "Internet access" via this, it's even less practical than IP Over Avian Carrier. But in the future it's less of a stretch than you might imagine that a phone-sized device could in an emergency far from civilisation get some basic network access to find you assistance.

The return link seems to be part of the EU's Galileo GNSS system, which has SAR components to it generally, and this is a new one:

* https://www.euspa.europa.eu/newsroom/news/galileo-return-lin...

Galileo's implementation actually seems to have entered "full operational capacity" a few months ago:

* https://ec.europa.eu/defence-industry-space/galileosar-uniqu...

The US has officially approved use of the appropriate spectrum (406 MHz) as well:

* https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/02/08/2021-02...

A fascinating aside. Thanks for sharing

All smartphones already have GPS?

True, but note the GPS data transmission rate is only 50 bps; yes, just 50 bits per second. The signal is so week and so slow that after headers and error correction you get less than 4 bytes of data per second.

When comparing satellite reception it's not so much if you can receive data or not, but at what bandwidth. By contrast, data rates for Starlink are roughly 50 to 100 megabits per second; a million times greater than GPS.

So that's why the Starlink dish and electronics are orders of magnitude larger than a phone. Or to put it another way, that's why mobile phones can handle GPS data but not Starlink data.

There will be no satellite internet on the iPhone 13.

pull-quote from the article:

> Apple has created a mechanism that will ask users to be outdoors and walk in a certain direction to help the iPhone connect to a satellite. Linking to a network also won’t always be instantaneous, with testing of the feature indicating that it could sometimes take up to one minute to work.

While that's in the style of a pull-quote, it is not a pull-quote. It's a quote from the Bloomberg article that the author of this article is generally disputing.

Back in the days there were stories about Bloomberg writers getting paid more if their stories move the markets [1]. According to the linked article this one really did the job, "Globalstar, a satellite services business, had their shares soar 90% from mid-August lows"

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa...

thats the bloomberg article... a "someone familuar with..." said kind of quote... how drunk where they? or what were they paid?

And I’m saying the pull quote is a lie or incorrect.