Space X- Starlink will start offering a smartphone service

Elon Musk's SpaceX teamed up with T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert to broadcast cellular service via Starlink satellites to "most places in the United States," including over half a million square miles of non-dead zones. covered by cellular networks.

The two companies will create a new mobile network to transmit T-Mobile's existing midband spectrum via Starlink satellites to anywhere in the continental United States, Hawaii, parts of Alaska and Puerto Rico. End of cellular blind spots.

SpaceX and T-Mobile wrote in a press release that the new network "will provide near-complete coverage in most of the United States, even in many of the more remote locations previously unreachable by traditional cellular signals."

Musk tweeted that the new service, which will be launched in 2023, "will eliminate dead zones around the world." Bloomberg explained how the new satellite-cellular service will work thanks to powerful antennas connected to the updated Starlink satellites:

Starlink V2, launching next year, will transmit direct to mobile phones, eliminating dead zones worldwide

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 26, 2022

The new network will be accessible thanks to large and powerful antennas connected to the Starlink satellites. Musk said each antenna will measure about 25 square meters and be "extremely advanced because it has to pick up a very low signal from your cell phone and then be captured by a satellite traveling at 17,000 miles per hour." The T-Mobile service will work in a similar way to data roaming: the user's mobile phone will search for the service and if not found it will connect to the satellite.

Bloomberg noted that most smartphones are already equipped with a technology that allows the signal to be transmitted into space, so no additional equipment will be required.

However, there are problems, especially related to bandwidth, as Bloomberg pointed out:

The main problem is the bandwidth, which will at first limit the service to text messages. The coverage area will be divided into large cell zones, with the connectivity of each zone limited to approximately 2-4 MB. Musk said this would make it possible to make approximately 1,000-2,000 voice calls per cell or millions of text messages, but the service will not replace land-based cellular stations .

"This is intended to provide basic coverage to areas that are currently completely dead," Musk said, adding that initially there may be a "half hour, possibly worse" delay for messages to pass through the system.

Tests of the new satellite-cellular service are scheduled for the end of the year, after SpaceX launches the new satellites into low Earth orbit.

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The Space X-Starlink article will start offering a smartphone service from ScenariEconomici.it .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/space-x-starlink-iniziera-a-offrire-un-servizio-per-smartphone/ on Sat, 27 Aug 2022 09:00:17 +0000.