T-Mobile Says Subscribers Will Be Able To Connect To Starlink's Second-Gen Satellites For Coverage

To see how attenuation issues are dealt with because of atmospheric, vegetative or other interference issues might be handled.

Even our space capsules and space labs / stations have had up / down link communications issues.

Sounds like this would be great for emergency calls. Not mention about price but unlikely to be reasonable for anyone not able to afford satellite phone now.

AT&T and Verizon Ask FCC To Throw a Wrench Into Starlink's Mobile Plan

https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/08/16/0124248/att-and-...

I was in the Galapagos Islands in April. The islands are largely uninhabited, hundreds of miles west of Ecuador in the Pacific, and cellphone towers are only found in very, very limited areas there. Including ocean, probably 95%+ of the region geographically has no cell service.

But our ship had no-extra-charge Starlink service that you could connect to via wi-fi while on board or very near the ship. I didn't try to make or receive any cellphone calls. I wasn't sure if that was even possible on my plan, but I didn't want to risk a huge bill from Verizon after I got home.

But we generally had very good web connectivity. Go back a generation or two, and rural customers who paid a lot of money for satellite Internet complained of extremely laggy page-loading. Not with Starlink. It might take an extra beat for a page to load, but if you weren't looking for a problem, you probably wouldn't notice. I don't know how they do it as fast as they do. Think of live TV interviews between US and Europe, presumably via satellite, and there's a lag of a few seconds between questions and answers.

Email worked fine. Audio streaming worked well. I didn't try video streaming or downloading a large file. There was no heavy weather, so I'm not sure what happens when there is. But overall for the limited uses I tested, Starlink worked quite well and exceeded my limited expectations. If I lived in a rural area with no other options, I'd consider subscribing.

The overwhelming majority of satellite connection services people are familiar with before Starlink use satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

That is a bit over 22,000 miles above the equator. So by the time you send something to a server and get a reply, the transaction has gone out and back, so over 88,000 extra miles. Even though the signals are moving at the speed of light, that is an extra half-second, which is plenty enough to notice.

By contrast the Starlink satellites are under 400 miles up. And there are thousands of them, so even though you will get more than 400 miles because of slant range, and even though the round trip will involve other ground travel, overall the latency advantage is huge.

All this is no secret, but the terrible barrier to low-earth orbit service was always the problem of how to make money given the huge number of satellites required to give initial coverage. Iridium is "sort-of" low, and "sort-of successful" (after the current company got the hardware for free in the bankruptcy of the first one), but most of the other efforts quit before launching a single bird. Right now the most likely competitor is Amazon's Project Kuiper.

That makes sense, Arch. It was that much faster than the old satellite Internet service.

And as for how it can make money, it will be a challenge, but Elon Musk may be counting on data mining from customers. There is certainly a demand for remote and mobile Internet service.

The current pricing is that you buy some hardware for a few hundred dollars to link your wifi to the satellites. Residential, non-mobile Internet is $120 a month unlimited data. A little higher than cable that doesn't have extra charges above a monthly data cap, but cheaper than the old satellite Internet, which was not unlimited. If you're mobile, such as boat or RV, the monthly fees are higher, mobile data is not unlimited, and you get an allocation of "Priority" monthly data with unlimited slower service above that. Business non-mobile is a little more than residential. It's not outrageous. Of course prices will go up and more data limits may appear at some point. It may be loss-leader pricing, perhaps to persuade officials that spending a lot of money to extend Internet into rural markets is not cost-effective.

I can't remember how long back this goes,,, likely actually the '80s but I remember it as the '70s. Phone service using geosynchronous satellites could drive you nuts. If both parties didn't self regulate their conversation to half-duplex then we would constantly interrupt one another unintentionally.

IIRC the vendor was Satellite Business Systems.

This is the latest I have read on this.

https://www.phonearena.com/news/FCC-deals-a-blow-to-T-Mobile...

Update: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the FCC has finalized its decision to not grant a waiver to SpaceX. It has been updated to reflect the correct information, which is that nothing can be decided until after August 29.

The error is regretted.

The original story continues below.

T-Mobile and SpaceX have been trying to convince the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider its out-of-band power flux-density (“PFD”) limit of -120 dBW/m2 /MHz so that they can go forward with their plan of introducing satellite texting this year. They might want to prepare themselves for some bad news.

In a new report that states the current rules for the deployment of supplemental coverage from space (SCS), the FCC has laid down its technical requirements. According to the rules, there won't be any relaxation on the power flux density limit of -120 dBW/m2 /MHz.

FCC deals a blow to T-Mobile and SpaceX's satellite ambitions but there's still hope

SpaceX was hoping for up to a ninefold increase to the limit, but the suggestion was met by opposition from AT&T, Verizon, EchoStar, and Omnispace, all of whom said that a relaxed out-of-band PFD would cause interference with their networks.

SpaceX will use its Starlink satellites to bring connectivity to dead zones using T-Mobile's PCS G Block spectrum. T-Mobile made another effort on August 22 to get the FCC to approve the waiver request for out-of-band PFD limits.

FCC deals a blow to T-Mobile and SpaceX's satellite ambitions but there's still hope

At the forefront of the argument was the point that like its rivals, T-Mobile also "has terrestrial operations in frequency bands that are adjacent to those in which SpaceX will operate," which is why it's equally paramount for the carrier to ensure satellite transmissions do not impact its operations.

The company holds the majority of the licenses for the C Block PCS spectrum, the upper band edge of which is directly adjacent to the spectrum that SpaceX will use to transmit signals for satellites. AT&T and Verizon, on the other hand, have significantly fewer licenses.

T-Mobile argued that SpaceX has demonstrated that its operations would protect adjacent-band operations and their competitors are overstating the importance of a conservative limit to delay the rollout of their direct-to-cellular service.

The company also said that SpaceX would not be able to offer robust satellite coverage if the FCC didn't relax its requirements. Now that it seems like the FCC is not amenable to SpaceX's suggestions, it's possible that AT&T and Verizon will deploy their satellite services before T-Mobile, while SpaceX works through the FCC's requirements.

The FCC is not expected to reach a final decision before August 29.

This will be disappointing to a number of people.

https://www.phonearena.com/news/T-Mobile-finally-confirms-wh...

T-Mobile and SpaceX are no longer confident about a 2024 launch for their satellite-based texting service.

The two joined forces in 2022 with a vision to blanket dead zones - areas without cellular signals - with coverage using SpaceX’s Starlink satellites and T-Mobile's wireless network.

T-Mobile's CEO Mike Sievert said in a recent interview that while the company's plan to launch a beta program of the direct-satellite-to-cellular service is still on track, it might not kick off until early next year.

We think we’re on track for a beta program of the direct-satellite-to-cellular program that we announced a while back—it could start late this year or early into next year.
Mike Sievert, T-Mobile's CEO, September 2024

Previously, the companies were targeting the fall for deployment. It's not clear what's causing the delay, but there are a couple of theories.

Firstly, as PCMag notes, SpaceX had previously said it would need 325 Direct to Cell satellites to launch the service, and as of September 17, the company had 175 direct-to-smartphone satellites in low-earth orbit. 13 more were launched just yesterday, and at this pace, SpaceX is unlikely to meet its goal.

SpaceX needs to have 325 Starlink satellites with direct-to-cell capabilities in orbit to launch the program. | Image Credit - Michael Nicolls, VP of Starlink Engineering, X - T-Mobile finally confirms what we have been fearing about its Starlink-powered service
SpaceX needs to have 325 Starlink satellites with direct-to-cell capabilities in orbit to launch the program. | Image Credit - Michael Nicolls, VP of Starlink Engineering, X

The other possibility is that SpaceX might need some more time to convince the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to relax its current out-of-band power flux-density (“PFD”) limit of -120 dBW/m2 /MHz, which rivals like AT&T and Verizon say would interfere with their operations.

In a September 13 filing, SpaceX reiterated the need for a more liberal out-of-band emissions limit, stating that the current "overly restrictive" limit would be detrimental to real-time communications and make the Direct to Cell service spotty and unreliable.

SpaceX says that it can take some steps to reduce aggregate out-of-band emissions of its direct-to-smartphone system, such as cutting down the number of active beams on a satellite, but not without "needlessly sacrificing reliable real-time communications."

SpaceX also fears that the restrictions will delay the rollout of emergency communications, such as 911 calls, as it will have to add additional capacity to make up for the throughput and coverage limits imposed by the -120 dBW/m2/MHz aggregate limit.

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Initially, T-Mobile's Direct to Cell service will only support texting and Wireless Emergency Alerts but after SpaceX has 1,500 satellites in orbit, the network will also support real-time communications, internet browsing, and social media posting.

In August, a new "T-Mobile SpaceX" network popped up in the Network Solution menu for some T-Mobile users, suggesting a rollout was not far off. Now that T-Mobile's CEO has revealed that the company is not sticking with its original plan of a fall launch, many customers are going to be disappointed.

It will be interesting to see. Most of the latency isn't from the trip there and back, but going thru the server and collecting and shipping the reply back to the satellite. Voice and SMS doesn't use a lot of bandwidth but other internet activities do. Will have to wait until the FCC chimes in.

What service do you have in mind? In my usage of satellite service, going back to the 1980's when I regularly talked by phone to colleagues in Israel using a connection that hit two geosynchronous satellites going each way, the latency was completely dominated by the time for the RF to propagate up and down from the ground.

Total was right around a second, which is much longer than it might seem when it gets into the middle of a conversation.

Apart from the latency, which was bad enough, more often than not echo cancellation was not working properly on the Israel end, so I'd get to hear my own last few words coming back.

This whole lashup was not by commercial telephone channels. Intel was buying a dedicated 50 kbps digital connection, and thought they would save telephone charges by using it for voice calls between Santa Clara and Haifa.