That's the thing that wasn't clear to me. Do these work with any old 5G phone, or does it need special hardware? E.g. the satellite functionality in the latest iPhones is essentially "emergency only", and it requires a bit of a song and dance to make sure you have visible sky and a direct line of sight to the satellite. The article seems to imply this would be different, and would (eventually) feel just like expanded cell coverage. So curious how this would work.
Being able to call is still a major improvement for small handhelds. My current Iridium device (in reach 2) usually still takes minutes to send messages even under a clear sky (and does so out of order).
... as a tech demo, with a single satellite in orbit, and it was actually less than a year ago. They haven't yet launched any more satellites and neither has anyone else. A commercial service will require dozens up to thousands of satellites. SpaceX just multiplied the number of satellites capable of this in orbit by 7.
Why is everyone trying so hard to shit on this? It's going to be awesome when we have truly global commercial cellular coverage that works with unmodified existing phones. SpaceX is almost certainly going to be the first to get there, but I hope many competitors get there soon after.
If you've used old style satellite internet and then used starlink, you'll know that this is not the same technology. Starlink has latency and bandwidth that doesn't even compare to the companies and satellites you are mentioning.
This is a tech and nerd forum. Let us be excited about new technology.
AST's satellite wasn't "old style satellite internet". It was at an altitude of 513km. That's roughly the same altitude as SpaceX's satellites (~550km).
AST's satellite was absolutely "new technology", last September.
SpaceX was beat for the "first phone service satellites", even for low orbit 5G satellites with unmodified phones.
I wish everything wouldn't be referred to as just "5G".
Looks like they used 800MHz, so basically the longest range cell phone bands. Which is about as expected, none of that super-fragile millimeter wave stuff.
SpaceX is using 1900MHz, which will make a difference but probably not a huge difference.
I know. But 90% of articles call specific arbitrary subsets "5G" and it gets annoying to have the details skipped. By 5G does an article mean the incremental improvements, the expansion in mid-range frequencies, or the mmwave stuff? It's a crapshoot.
Let alone more subtle but important information like whether it's 5G in both directions.
> > This is a tech and nerd forum. Let us be excited about new technology.
It's the same old re-inventing the wheel with Musk cult of personality marketing slapped on top of it.
New thing of the 2020s is the mRNA vaccine which solved a big problem, people took it and then endlessly bitched about it while mirin and salivating at the Tesla cybertruck or the 300k Tesla Roadster which will never enter into production.
It doesn't pay to build stuff and innovate nowadays, it's more about conning people into thinking that some stuff will be built sometime in the future™ and it will be revolutionary, and then move the goalposts perpetually into the future™
Are you saying SpaceX isn't innovating? This has nothing to do with musk by the way, one can say that SpaceX is impressive and innovative while also disliking musk.
Innovation serves as a means to an end, like for example mRNA vaccines solved a big problem like COVID.
SpaceX doesn't solve any problem, 90% of the global population lives in urban areas, they connect to the internet using cell towers propagating 3/4/5G and good old fiber or fiber+copper
The remaining 10% is too poor so they cannot afford it, and they are also unskilled so if they want a shot a decent life they'd have to move to cities too where they can start as manual laborers and slowly climb the social ladder, they'd have to do it either independently or thanks to help from NGOs, UNICEF, UN, Doctors without borders etc. To put it bluntly fast internet is the last of their necessities.
SpaceX is textbook SV self dealing and wealth isolation where a bunch of assholes (led by the Chief Asshole of SV) who want to play with rockets and get paid for it , so they try to retroactively find a pitch to sell to VCs and asset managers to finance their play time and they do so by pitching them stuff like:
"Internet on your 10M sailboat" or
"Internet on your 2M Luxury RV"
And of course they get billions because VCs are also loaded and so they painted themselves so much in the corner with their wealth that the only thing that makes them enthusiastic is thin marginal improvement to trophy assets like a 10M sailboat or a 2M luxury RV, stuff that is totally uncorrelated with what regular consumers want or what the economy at large needs.
Holy hell. This take is so arrogant it’s incredible. Get out of your city bubble sometime.
I live in a rural area (the nearest town has a population of ~500) and use Starlink. I’m a photographer/software developer. My wife is a financial analyst. We have friends or family in the area that are teachers, engineers, nurses, small business owners, etc. Not everyone living outside of a large city is a freaking coal miner.
My wife works remotely and I need to upload large amounts of data for my job. Starlink has probably done more to help with housing prices in cities than every politician in the US combined as it allows people to work remotely anywhere.
That's a completely arbitrary definition though. If it's only innovation when it's useful, most inventions wouldn't be innovative when they were discovered or created. Going by your definition, mRNA vaccines weren't innovative until they were used in COVID vaccines, even though they have been worked on for years before.
Also, I don't want to debate the specifics of starlink or spacex, but starlink isn't really that much more expensive at all compared to average internet pricing here in Canada outside of the big 3 cities. Also, if SpaceX isn't useful for anyone, who is filling and buying all those launches (outside of starlink)? Are the satellite operators that use SpaceX also useless?
Musk doesn't innovate per-se, he just dusts off old DARPA projects and convinced young engineers to work on them. Autonomous cars, reusable rockets, neuralink, Strategic Defense Initiative... Musks genius is making it seem like these are not long-studied military tech objectives but for humanity. The SDI stuff is very DoD centered-- Starlink as a business doesn't compute without military.
Taking something from a research prototype proof-of-concept to production absolutely counts as innovation. In some ways it's the most difficult and impactful phase of innovation.
Likewise there's an early DARPA project for basically any technology you care to name. That says a lot about US budgetary politics and not much about the tech itself. Spend a few hundred million on most research and development and it's a big-government boondoggle; make it a national security appropriation and no one in Congress will bat an eye.
Those young engineers have worked really hard and done some extremely impressive things. Perfectly possible to acknowledge that, whatever you think of the majority shareholder.