Satellites Are Becoming the New Cellphone Towers

I was recently in a country that strictly controls internet communications. Like, total lockdown absolutely forbidden levels of control. I spent my time there constantly wondering about the inevitable advent of ubiquitous wireless communication via things like Starlink and what the effects would be on these totalitarian regimes.<p>Edit: I didn&#x27;t mean to focus on Starlink specifically. Eventually it won&#x27;t just be Starlink up there, and likely our mobile devices will need less and less power to communicate with those satellites. So I&#x27;m less interested in the effects of <i>Starlink</i> and more on satellite communications generally.

I wouldn&#x27;t call it &quot;The new cellphone towers&quot; as if satellite service will replace ground based. Because it won&#x27;t.<p>Starlink direct to cell will still cover huge areas per cell which is great for remote areas but not for high density like cities. It will not have strong enough signals to penetrate buildings. And it won&#x27;t provide enough bandwidth for more than texts at least not for now.<p>It&#x27;s an augmentation of the land based service, not a replacement.

Maybe the carriers’ marketing departments will hand out little 4 bar stickers to put in the upper corners of your phone while they loudly proclaim “full bars everywhere!” Of course, conveniently continuing to ignore latency in the mobile core, which is what increasingly impacts end user quality of service more than “bars.”

Why you should if you don&#x27;t have to ? Satellite phones are a thing at least since the 90s, but nowadays you prefer some kind of communication via Internet, possibly using wifi. Ok, emergency call, place out the civilisation, but those are same use case present 30 years ago. If you don&#x27;t have to you want to use real cell towers or wifi. Also I think that to cover the communication needs of a single western rich country they have to increase the number of satellite drastically, with lot of side effects. So really satellites aren&#x27;t new cell towers. Besides, is that type of infrastructure so profitable to justify its creation ? I want to say, if I wasn&#x27;t able to do an emergency call the problem was dead battery, not absence of signal, in other cases I use the ol&#x27; dirty Marconi&#x27;s wireless telegraph: the radio. Obviously , if I have a way to send sms from desert place, it&#x27;s a &quot;nice to have feature&quot; not a necessity for the majority of us, so, again , how the company want to monetise from the infrastructure that is greatly expensive ?

It’s hard to bet against human determination but on the face of it, it seems out of reach to put satellite voice calls in a package the size of an iPhone.<p>The power requirements and thus the bulky batteries of existing satellite phones could be reduced by switching to protocols which trade off bandwidth for higher error correction abilities through encoding and I don’t think existing satellite phones use the most bandwidth efficient encoding available so that could be another improvement.<p>There’s still the free space path loss between the surface of earth and a Globalstar or Starlink which my best guess estimate is in the order of 130db (can anyone more knowledgeable share a better estimate? I assumed bottom end of L-band, a height between Starlink and Globalstar, and used unverified dBi values for antennas at both ends).<p>Then there’s latency but I don’t think that’s a show stopper for many common use cases of voice and data.

I don&#x27;t love this model. It feels so censorable and state-adjacent. All states need to do is convince whoever controls the satellites to accept their terms. It&#x27;s such a small number of points of failure.<p>The mesh model, where every rooftop is a node routing encrypted traffic to neighbors, feels much more sustainable &#x2F; forward-looking to me.

Something I have wondered about is how can a layman like me could communicate with a satellite? I would need an antenna of some sort I believe but then what&#x27;s the protocol?

Interesting Read! How will this change influence companies like American Tower? How fast will they need to adapt? 5 years, 10 years, 20 years?

I certainly hope we don&#x27;t rely only on satellites, in case of a solar flare that destroys all the satellites.

Larger antennas and better beamforming are routing calls through orbit

Likely won&#x27;t work indoors where humans spend most of their time.

&gt; AST SpaceMobile’s first satellites had antennas with surface areas of 64 square meters<p>Pic- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spacenews.com&#x2F;ast-spacemobile-secures-communications-with-prototype&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spacenews.com&#x2F;ast-spacemobile-secures-communications...</a><p>Pic from earth - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tzukran&#x2F;status&#x2F;1731409049004982558" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tzukran&#x2F;status&#x2F;1731409049004982558</a>