Apple has partnered with Globalstar to use geostationary satellites to send incredibly small amounts of data measured in bytes, not kilobytes. These satellites have only limited bandwidth, and it's very expensive. And with the antenna size and power available in a phone today, it's never going to be more than kilobytes.
SpaceX Starlink/TMobile announced a much higher-bandwidth option, but it's incredibly fleeting, lasting just a few seconds.
Starlink satellites are in very low Earth orbit, moving at 8km/second. You can't just point an antenna at it and have it work. The antenna needs to track the satellite. And it needs to have a constant line of sight free of obstructions. Starlink currently builds a very cheap phased-array antenna, but it's still ~$1,000 to manufacture, it's a couple cubic feet in volume, and it uses >100 watts.
Starlink V2 will bring very large antennas to Starlink satellites which will enable direct 5G connectivity, but that connectivity will last for a few seconds, with perhaps thirty minutes between connections.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but no one knows how to build a satellite system currently that will cause any carriers to shit their pants.
It sounded like temporary connectivity was only initially; once they have a full shell of V2 satellites I would expect constant connectivity.
I haven't read the announcement, but Globalstar's constellation is in LEO.
what most people think of as a satellite phone is indeed LEO since iridium has the lion's share of the market.
What they might be able to do is expand this to something like limited texting, or maybe down the line even non-realtime voice messaging.
Google’s Lyra codec can already get down to 3Kb/s and be reasonably audible. It’s not a stretch to imagine within a few years we’ll be able to push that to below 1Kb/s.
Taking those two things together, I think it’s fairly reasonable to assume at least text and voice are within reach.
> The screen showed a color image with high resolution. Looking at it carefully, one realized the thing was a poor evocation…. Kjet recognized Owner Limmende and Jan Skrits, her chief of staff, but they looked several years out of style. Ølvira [the ship] was matching old video with the transmitted animation cues. The actual communication channel was less that four thousand bits per second; Central was taking no chances.
> [...]
> The picture was crisp and clear, but when the figures moved it was with cartoonlike awkwardness. And some of the faces belonged to people Kjet knew had been transferred […] The processors here on the Ølvira were taking the narrow-band signal from Fleet Central, fleshing it out with detailed (and out of date) background and evoking the image shown.
If you use smaller antenna elements you must use a higher frequency, and higher frequencies are more attenuated by the earth's atmosphere (generally, when you get to THz there is a window or else visible light wouldn't be able to penetrate) so they have no chance of making it to a satellite.
If you use less elements you lose all your gain in the side lobes, as the other commenter mentioned
globalstar's existing network and licenses have nothing to do with geostationary at all.
please don't comment on things like this if you have fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of different types of mutually incompatible satellite network technology.
People already do this when communicating from the ground via amateur satellites on handheld radios. Here the fellow followed the sweep of the sky with his yagi.
(Disclaimer: casual observer at best. May be misrepresenting what I’ve heard.)
This makes me think it's less of an affordability issue, and more of where they fall along spectrum on amount of margin that can be squeezed from smaller suppliers.
https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-cove...
I'd also bet on Starlink to scale better than Globalstar (after they also own the fucking rockets). Add better features and innovate