SpaceX Has Launched Starlink's First Direct-to-Smartphone Satellites

Re:SpaceX Has Launched Starlink's First Direct-to-Smartphone... by chewmieser on Sunday January 07, 2024 @07:55AM (#38900822)

To clarify for those that may have missed it -

These satellites mimic 5G so most existing 5G phones should be compatible without additional hardware.

The beams are REALLY low bandwidth (7MB per beam and the beams are “very big”), and that bandwidth is shared with the whole beam. You will only use this for emergencies, at least for now.

The point will be to expand coverage in areas that it may be difficult to add coverage. It won’t replace or augment regular towers.

It will only allow texting later this year, and they expect to scale up to voice and data next year as well as IOT - whatever that means since they broke it out separately.

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Re:SpaceX Has Launched Starlink's First Direct-to-Smartphone... by Y_Y on Sunday January 07, 2024 @08:10AM (#38900907)

IoT is when your fridge knows your eating habits and credit card number and autonomously shares that information with interested third parties.

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Re:SpaceX Has Launched Starlink's First Direct-to-Smartphone... by Gare on Sunday January 07, 2024 @08:14AM (#38900926)

Or it might be some solar powered sensor deep in the forest detecting trees falling down.

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Re:SpaceX Has Launched Starlink's First Direct-to-Smartphone... by conover on Sunday January 07, 2024 @08:22AM (#38900980)

The sound aspect of the simulation of reality is going to take up a lot more cycles if we’re going to be hearing every tree that falls in the forest…

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Re:SpaceX Has Launched Starlink's First Direct-to-Smartphone... by sph on Sunday January 07, 2024 @08:48AM (#38901145)

The thing is we're in the simulation as well, so we wouldn't notice any slowdown of the "host" machine itself.

But yeah, maybe it'll start consuming so much energy our alien gods will just shut our universe down. Thanks, Elon.

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Re:SpaceX Has Launched Starlink's First Direct-to-Smartphone... by simondotau on Sunday January 07, 2024 @08:58AM (#38901210)

The sound recording data doesn’t need to be simulated to a high precision, especially for the 99.999% of the time when trees aren’t falling.

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Re:SpaceX Has Launched Starlink's First Direct-to-Smartphone... by cyanydeez on Sunday January 07, 2024 @01:16PM (#38903587)

I mean, one means frothing capitalism and the other trying to figure out whether it makes a sound

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Re:SpaceX Has Launched Starlink's First Direct-to-Smartphone... by maximus-decimus on Sunday January 07, 2024 @08:52AM (#38901172)

I thought it was when hackers could control the color of your light bulbs.

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Re:SpaceX Has Launched Starlink's First Direct-to-Smartphone... by est31 on Sunday January 07, 2024 @09:23AM (#38901400)

There is a lot of IoT: autonomous forklifts in a parking lot, TVs that upload which TV shows you watched, oil pumps in the middle of nowhere, smart meters. Some make more sense, others less. But yeah, often consumer privacy and user control of the devices they bought is not the priority of the IoT activated device manufacturers.

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Re:SpaceX Has Launched Starlink's First Direct-to-Smartphone... by SigmundA on Sunday January 07, 2024 @10:09AM (#38901801)

Just being able to text and send location would be huge for emergency communications and letting people know you are ok. This will probably completely replace sat based communicators like Garmin inReach.

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Re:SpaceX Has Launched Starlink's First Direct-to-Smartphone... by inemesitaffia on Thursday January 11, 2024 @10:25AM (#38953442)

For IOT think swarm technologies.

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