[pontilanda]

What? My wifi barely reaches the other side of my room with a wall in between, how am I supposed to think 350 miles is within reason? Even with clear sky, your signal to a tower an order of magnitude closer would be unusable.

If you look at apple’s latest feature, even them, with specific hardware probably, requires minutes of open-sky pointing directly at the closest satellite, to transmit mere bytes of data.

That tells me that if your phone is just hanging in your pocket, indoors, with a 5G nearby, it’s not going to reach the satellite at in any shape or form.

[martyvis]

I know nothing of your own situation, but having personally deployed fully working and operational WiFi for a 10000 plus seat stadium, various other campuses, but also seeing cell phones work in your pocket moving in a car or in a big city shopping centre is amazing. Even the Starlink stuff that is already deployed.

Anyway let's wait and see - I'm pretty sure T-Mobile wouldn't have signed on for something that is just a pipedream

[pontilanda]

> This would amaze anyone from before the 70s.

I'm not saying that it's impossible, I'm just pointing out your smugness at the fact that it's not common knowledge.

> the Starlink stuff

You mean the stuff that requires a large, hot disc on your roof and therefore not in your pocket? Are we talking about the same things there?

> I'm pretty sure T-Mobile wouldn't have signed

You trust big companies too much, they make mistakes all the time.

[katbyte]

Takes a much bigger radio to get the bandwidth for a starlink, 100mbs. Texting is on the order of bps. Garmin inreach mini is around the size of a tictac box and can send and receive texts.

[dmitrygr]

> I'm pretty sure T-Mobile wouldn't have signed on for something that is just a pipedream

Las Vegas and a few other cities did, from the same salesman: https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-boring-company-tunnel...

[justsomehnguy]

15 years ago you need a clear view of the sky to get a GPS fix, forget about the indoors.

You can't get an unassisted fix indoors now, but it's totally capable to get a fix near the window.

> pocket, indoors, with a 5G nearby

I assume this tech is to be used outdoors without a 5G nearby.

[1123581321]

Globalstar's network is LEO, but it's sparser (a couple dozen satellites) and about three times further away from earth.

[shaklee3]

it also uses a special antenna only in new iPhones that T-Mobile doesn't have the luxury of

[1123581321]

They're nice, but shouldn't be needed. Ubiquitilink (mentioned as Lynk in the article) has proven 500km two-way connections without them. A large constellation at that height with large antennas and spectrum rights should be able to offer higher bandwidth service than Globalstar's current network offers to iPhones.

Globalstar's capabilities aren't frozen either. The Apple deal uses most of their capacity, but they'll be launching additional satellites. While they're not in the current deal, Globalstar could launch a lower LEO service in the future. Cell phones with bigger antennas, like the case antennas in the new iPhones, would have better sat service communicating at Starlink's range.

We're also in relatively early days of large antenna deployment. AST's record-setting antennas are going to look quaint as launch costs and more complicated deployments continue to advance and benefit every satellite network.