Technology is on the brink of letting you text, call and video call directly to satellite from your everyday smartphone. You might be 500 km west of Uluru and want to contact your relatives and friends in Sydney, Melbourne or Perth.
There are obstacles to this happening quickly. You need a service such as Starlink with its constellations of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites continually travelling overhead. You might need changes to the antenna system in the phone. You will also need a chip in your phone that makes it possible.
Companies such as Taiwan’s MediaTek which makes millions of chips for Android phones have been working on this. It demonstrated decent quality smartphone video calls to satellite and back at last year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It will take time for these three phases – messaging, calls, and video calls to roll out.
For many phone users this time frame is too long, and that’s where Lynk Global’s ingenious system comes in. It has turned its LEO satellites into mobile phone towers in space, so instead of beaming up cold to a satellite, you join Lynk Global’s mobile network beamed from lower space to you on the ground. The fact this is a regular mobile connection means you can use your phone without modification.
The novelty of this service has inspired dozens of mobile service providers (it calls them MNO’s or mobile network operators) in more than 50 countries to join, and Telstra is one of them. The Australian telco’s game plan so far with LEO satellite services is to offer them as an addition to its own network to patch the holes. For good reasons, Telstra is being cautious is just announcing a trial.
Telstra’s network technology director Channa Seneviratn says there is “no specific time frame” about its use. “What we are saying is that we will be doing a trial with Lynk Global this year, and that’s for text messaging services,” he told journalists yesterday. “That’s about what I can share.”
Lynk Global
Fellow Telstra executive Shailin Sehgal says the deal with Lynk Global is a proof of concept and trial agreement.
“There have been no commitments from a date point of view. We are working with them on defining the technology. It’s going to look like a roaming agreement with them. And messaging would be the first service we’re going to try.”
He says the service will be SMS text messaging only, so you can’t use apps such as Messenger or WhatsApp. And you need direct line-of-sight.
Elon Musk’s Starlink is testing a similar service which it calls “Direct to Cell”. It has been testing sending SMS messages using six satellites that were launched on January 2 this year. Optus has already signed up with Starlink to use its particular service.
There are good reasons for caution with Lynk Global. Apart from two test satellites launched in 2020 and 2021, Lynk has three operational satellites of its own in space which isn’t a lot for continuous operation given LEO satellite constellations are continuously moving past you overhead. Communications switch from one to the next. Compare that with Starlink’s 5000 or OneWeb’s 500.
Lynk Global’s CTO Greg Pelton a year ago announced a deal with Qualcomm to use Iridium’s 66 satellites which would fix this. But service speeds are small too. “The highest speed service we have today is 700kbps from our network,” Pelton said in March 2023. Of course, all this can change quickly.
There is also the ticking timebomb of smartphone technology catching up and making services direct to Starlink, OneWeb and others viable soon, with much faster speeds. It’s all in the timing.
Nevertheless the idea of turning LEO satellites into floating mobile phone towers in space is pure genius by founders Charles Miller, formerly from Nanoracks, a space service company. He has plenty of experience deploying LEO satellites into space. And there’s fellow co-founders Margo Deckard and Tyghe Speidel.
