At first, this service created in partnership with T-Mobile will only send messages.
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Allow calls or send SMS in high mountains, at sea and from all other areas of the globe where there is no telephone network, allowing ordinary phones to communicate directly with satellites . This is the new Marotte of Elon Musk, the boss of Starlink (and Tesla), who has Announced Thursday August 25 The opening of a satellite communication service intended for smartphones by 2024 in the United States, in partnership with T-Mobile , one of the largest world telephone operators.
To achieve this, satellites of a new kind will be added to the Starlink constellation, the Internet access provider which already includes several thousand. These will behave like “cell communication towers in the sky”, capable of dialogue with most current 5G smartphones, around the 2.5 kilohertz radio band (KHz).
The challenge is not thin, because, unlike telephone laps, starlink satellites gravitate at the speed of 27,000 kilometers per hour, at a distance of 550 kilometers from the earth. On Earth, telephone towers bear only about ten kilometers. To succeed in connecting to the Internet via the current Starlink constellation, you must equip yourself with a parabolic antenna.
giant antenna
To connect completely ordinary smartphones to its new satellites, Sarlink works to modify their space antenna, “larger and extremely sophisticated”, said Elon Musk on stage. If this antenna is still only a laboratory prototype, the Starlink boss is “convinced that it will work” once in space. According to him, the connection will be established even when the smartphone is in your pocket. More prudent, the CEO of T-Mobile provides that the service will work when we have “a clear view of the sky”.
First, the service will be limited to sending and receiving SMS and MMS messages. Subsequently, he will be able to convey telephone conversations and data – at slow speed since users connected to a satellite will share a hoped -for band from 2 to 4 mega -typles per second. What to convey, according to Musk, 1,000 to 2,000 simultaneous calls, or several hundred thousand text messages.
This competition will competition will the various messaging, telephony, or satellite alert services already existing, such as COSPAS-SARSAT, SPOT, INREACH, IRIDIUM, etc. Services that have a weakness: they all require the purchase of a specific communication device costing 300 to 1,000 euros.
The new Starlink service will be integrated free of charge into high-end T-Mobile packages, but paying for economic packages. According to the CEO of T -Mobile, the fares of messages will be significantly lower than those of existing satellite offers – whose prices vary strongly, but cost around 50 euros per month for the Spot and Inreach messaging services.
On stage, the CEO of T-Mobile called the world’s largest operators to contact him in order to generalize the satellite connection offer to all continents, as part of his homelessness partnerships.