Lynk with headquarters in Virginia (USA) directly connected hundreds of ordinary mobile phones in the USA, Great Britain and the Bahamas to the Shannon’s own spacecraft for Internet access, writes ARSTECHNICA.
Communication was used to send short text messages in the difficult-sampled regions and did not require special equipment for the user. “In essence, our satellite looks for your mobile phone as a standard cellular tower,” said co-founder and executive director Lynk Charles Miller.
According to him, to connect the phone to the company’s satellite, several technical problems had to solve, in particular, to get rid of the interference created by other mobile phones, and compensate for a large amount of Doppler shift between the spacecraft and the ground smartphone. “Existing phones and mobile networks are customized to support ultra-speed trains, but not satellites with orbital speeds,” the publication notes.
One acting Shannon provides access to the network only within a few minutes a day for a small clock interval. Lynk plans to run in 2022 ten such satellites at a height of about 500 kilometers, which will allow to cover most of the planet every few hours. Real-time continuous coating requires 1500 satellites.
Currently, the company has focused on providing text messaging services, paying particular attention to the possibilities of saving the life of users who have found themselves in a difficult situation in a hard-to-reach area. In Lynk, we are confident that in the future, the development of a satellite group will allow to provide the ability to turn to broadband Internet, the final prices to which the mobile operator will be installed.
The company attracted investments in the amount of $ 20 million, most of which are not spent. Studies conducted by Lynk show that the usual mobile phone on average is connected to the ground network for about 85 percent of cases. “Thus, about 750 million people are currently disconnected from the network. This market, which Lynk intends to occupy. At the moment, the company has reached agreement with telecom operators with ALIV in the Bahamas and Telecel Centrafrique in the Tsar,” says ARSTECHNICA.
In September, the University of Ohio, referring to the study aimed at publishing an IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems magazine, said that the Starlink global Internet system can be used as a replacement for Global Positioning System (GPS) and a global navigation satellite system ( GLONASS).