This would be a baseband only change really. Iridium has about the same frequency (1-2 GHz), directionality (omnidirectional antennas are good enough) and power constraints 1-2 Watt) as good old GSM.
It‘s just the spectrum that is very, very expensive (due to a cell being hundreds of kilometers in diameter).
Has there been a breakthrough on how small an Iridium receiver/phone can be? Because otherwise I'm going to call BS on this report. LEO satellite receivers are typically much bigger than what can be crammed into an iphone.
I have a Garmin InReach Mini. It uses the Iridium satellite network. No calls, but it can do texts and data. It’s dimensions are 23x23mm. It worked quite well in the Arctic wilderness this summer. So I would say putting satellite capability within a phone size form factor seems quite achievable.
I was quite happy to read this news simply for the fact that if true it should hopefully cut into the arm-and-leg price Garmin charges for me to use my InReach to access the satellite network.
Small satellite receivers are possible and exist for extremely low bandwidth signals. Text messages could be feasible. There are small devices on the market for sending texts via satellite.
The part of this article about FaceTime calls over satellite sounds like editorialization, though. FaceTime requires a relatively large amount of bandwidth to pull off, which isn’t in the realm of possibility with current systems.
How much data would be available? Apple have been doing stuff adjacent to this NVIDIA announcement (116 bytes/frame of key-point data, with a GAN or a 3D model for reconstruction) from last year since at least Memoji: https://youtu.be/NqmMnjJ6GEg
Iridium operates at 1620 MHz. Many cell signals operate much lower than that (ie some 4G at 700mhz). If you can fit a 4G antenna in a phone you can easily fit one for iridium.
> If you can fit a 4G antenna in a phone you can easily fit one for iridium
The frequency isn’t the issue, it’s the distance it needs to transmit. Increased output power/longer distance needs a bigger antenna. Iridium / Starlink / other LEO satellites are >300 miles above the earth. Your smartphone doesn’t have even remotely enough power to transmit that far, good luck getting even 1/10th that distance for even a very shaky connection.
As a concrete example, your phone’s cell radio transmits at 100-200mW into an antenna which has minimal additional gain. Iridium / Inmarsat phones transmit at around 10W into a higher gain and significantly larger antenna. That’s two orders of magnitude more EIRP in the end.
Apple might be able to do an emergency beacon like transmission from an iPhone into LEO, but assuredly can not do a continuous transmission like in a phone call, even at very poor audio quality, without a relatively massive change in phone dimensions.
Transmit power has nothing to do with antenna length. In fact if you change the antenna length you change the resonating frequency of the antenna. Satellites are also line of sight and most sat antennas radiate straight up instead of multi-directional like cell antennas.
In any case iridium devices usually output max 2w. Same as 4G.
> In any case iridium devices usually output max 2w.
Not according to Iridium’s data sheets I just read and provided values in my post
> Same as 4G
Nope, back in AMPS days power could be up to 2W, but 4G UEs are almost always limited to a maximum of 23dBm (aka 200mW).
> Transmit power has nothing to do with antenna length.
Correct if you are purely talking about antenna design from a generic pov. In the case of a phone, it does matter because you can’t transmit 10W into an omnidirectional antenna pressed up against someone’s ear due to current regulations, so it necessitates moving the antenna further away (hence one reason sat phones have a “whip antenna”, but there are other reasons too). This effectively makes the antenna “larger”.
Iridium, and Globalstar are low earth orbit systems needing very different radio hardware.
It may sound super counterintuitive, but providing a stable link to a geosynchronous satellite on a handheld hardware with tiny antenna is easier than with fast flying low earth orbit satellites.
And I doubt't that voice communications, or even Internet service would be there, just SMS, or pager like functionality most likelly.
Iridium modems are among the smallest satellite transceivers available, much smaller than GEO ones.
Looking at something like the Garmin InReach shows what‘s possible with Iridium, and I imagine Apple would be throwing a lot more money at the technical/design constraints.
addendum: does anyone know if those actually have different requirements? obviously calls are more data and thus need more energy, but from a quick search through public documentation I don't find a clear claim that the Short Burst Data service actually uses a less-demanding encoding.
Than system communicating with geostationary sats.
Training the circuitry onto one weak, but stable satellite signal is much easier than keeping readjusting, or communicting with multiple satellites at once.
Just like with the GPS, the trick is the super duper accurate, and stable frequency reference.
> Skipping the Americas does not sound like a typical Apple move.
I know of one place where Apple does this: in China, and only China, you can buy an iPhone with two physical SIM slots. You can do Dual SIM on iPhones elsewhere, but only with an eSIM.
I know, it's incredibly annoying, I'd love a dual SIM iPhone but you simply can't buy one in the EU other than a grey import from China without warranty. And no, neither of my two operators support eSIM.
I recently saw a Youtube video of someone who bought the sim card "daughter board" and sim tray from a Chinese iPhone and put it in a non-dual sim iPhone and it just worked. I can't remember the channel but it was from one of the fairly popular phone repair ones, so it should be pretty easy to find. The only real downside is that you have to open up your phone to swap the daughter board out and all that entails (the risk of breaking something, warranty, waterproofing, etc)
What kind of precision we talk about here and why would they give a damn? It would suck for sailors to get their satcom banned because they appear to be close to the Indian waters but not intending to enter
Isn't the baseband a separate chip which would have to be cracked separately? A phone already needs to enforce many RF restrictions, one more doesn't sound like a big deal.
India has (had?) a monopoly on telecommunications. My company couldn’t send voip phones to our Indian employees like we do for employees everywhere else.
Following the Mumbai terror attacks in 2011, the Directorate General of Shipping (DGS)in India banned the use of “Thuraya, Iridium and other such satellite phones” in Indian waters.
Are you sure it is completely banned? I thought you just need permission (in the form of a "no objection certificate") from the Home Ministry in India before you can own and operate a satellite phone?
If you come to China with a foreign SIM card and use data roaming, there are no firewall restrictions there. At least that's what I know from a few years ago. One trick travellers had was to get a SIM card from Hong Kong (again, before the crackdowns) because the roaming prices inside China were good (I can't remember if it was non-existant) but the Internet was not censored...
They can shoot down the satellites if they break the law though. That's why bypassing China's firewall isn't as easy as sneaking in a Starlink base station
They have absolutely no way to detect what those people are doing with that property when it comes to satellites though - they can't detect that you're doing it, and they don't have much practical way to block it either.
All competent governments on earth already regulate wireless communications, including satellite communications. Most have found it fairly effective to regulate trade and manufacture of such devices.
At a minimum, it is effective enough that it is a response that would be expected to be elicited if a government found a device undesirable.
I don't know what your experience is in this area, but how do you believe they regulate access to a satellite from another nation flying overhead if your people have the device to access it?
You can just about jam GPS signals locally (within a few km if you pour the resources into it.) Nations are not able in practice to generally jam satellite signals.
We know that nations are not able to do this in practice... because it's how people from those locations are calling out to us.
> how do you believe they regulate access to a satellite from another nation flying overhead if your people have the device to access it?
You don’t. You prevent people from getting access to the device in the first place. There are no countries where people already have iPhone 13s. A country that doesn’t want them, could certainly ban their import.
There ain’t too many people watching HBO on their satellite TVs in North Korea.
The point is that they restrict you obtaining said property. Of course not 100%, but how popular would an iPhone that you need to smuggle into the country and that gets you arrested (or at least the device destroyed and you fined) if found by police be?
No specific response is needed as a bunch of countries already have pre-existing rules that require prohibit importing satellite communications devices without special permits even (or perhaps especially for) personal use - it just doesn't get much attention as e.g. Iridium phones are not that common.
But if these countries do nothing and change nothing, this feature means that it would be prohibited to bring iPhone 13s in the country without special permits.
I am sure that Apple will fix this, probably by disabling this feature in India. That is one of the nice things about Apple, when you run into issues like this, things happen, precisely because they are so common.
I got a Somewear recently (really happy with it too) almost expecting this to finally land in this year‘s iPhones in a classic late early adopter‘s moment.
At least you‘ll be able to resell it to Android users :)
I’ve got the big one last year. It’s still worth it — while the usage overlaps a bit, you still want a ruggerized device that can survive knocks and submersion for emergencies.
Definitely. An iPhone is still a glass slab, after all. Drop it on a rock screen-down and the screen can still easily break. Plus, a dedicated device can have better battery life.
Hold onto it. I use my iPhone for pictures and GPS tracking (with paper maps as backup) when hiking but don’t trust the battery enough for emergency use.
The mini can last for days, or even weeks between charges and is extremely rugged.
Yes but we've also been told for years that apple absolutely and categorically cannot include a headphone jack any more because they used the room for other things, but now suddenly there's room for a satellite radio and antenna?
> we've also been told for years that apple absolutely and categorically cannot include a headphone jack
Have we?
I‘m actually glad they are using the space for something I‘d actually be using, and I doubt that I am the minority in this.
> now suddenly there's room for a satellite radio and antenna?
It wouldn‘t be a new baseband or probably even transceiver. Iridium is 1.5 GHz, which is probably covered by one of the existing power amplifiers, and the radio technology is pretty similar to GSM and probably integrated into the existing baseband.
If nothing else it would be cool to be able to send an sos with coordinates from anywhere on earth. You’d think such a small message could conceivably get through to a satellite.
Honestly, if the coverage is good and it doesn’t cost too much, this would get me to upgrade years before I was planning. I live in an area with frustratingly bad coverage from all providers, and if we ever go on a hike or something a little further out of the city, we get no service at all about 30% of the time. I’d like the extra peace of mind for any potential emergencies.
Not the only use-case. It would also be nice to just have some limited communication abilities in areas pretty close to our house where we currently have non-negligible dead zones.
I've wondered why they don't implement LoRA, if they want another type of radio network. You could message other iPhones even if none of you have a cell signal. Low power, doesn't need a big antenna.
I frequently mountain bike alone in areas without reception. I bought a PLB1 so I have an “oh shit” button if something goes wrong (or I run into someone else in a similar situation). No monthly fee was the huge selling point to me. I could care less if I can text or pair my phone.
I feel massively safer having this beacon in my pack. It also makes a great, albeit expensive, gift for friends who are similarly active.
It might not, but it‘s entirely within reach as of today. The technology exists; what remains is a scaling/economic problem. Apple is pretty good at solving those.
It is only within reach because of SpaceX, and they haven't launched anything for Apple or any stealth Apple subsidiaries yet (unless they somehow launched several Apple LEO comsats under the guise of an NRO launch or something, which would be outright lying, not something I believe SpaceX would
do).
Just because it's possible doesn't mean it actually happened.
Like one of these Breitling emergency watches where you pull out a long cord out of the watch and then it sends an SOS signal. Except that with the watch the antenna is single use only to prevent abuse.
Communicating 100km up is far far easier than communicating 100km sideways. Much less air to go through, and less obstructions. A few space startups out there have missions in the sky right now able to do this. The trick is to but high gain on the satellite side to compensate and phased array communications has been coming a long way to really target the power into a directed path than just beaconing.
> Communicating 100km up is far far easier than communicating 100km sideways
Yes, and no. it depends on the frequency.
However I don't want to put a phased array shitting out 4-15 watts of power at 1.6gigs near my head. I doubt it'll pass the emissions certification either.
This is one of the more intriguing rumors. I'm not even remotely qualified to say if it's feasible or not. But, if it was, I'm curious about pricing. Would users need to contract with one of the existing satellite providers? Or would carriers start offering "Satellite Add-on" for $10/$20/$30 a month for X number of texts?
And would there be free SOS emergency service? Seems like that would be a huge selling point to get people to upgrade. People who wouldn't otherwise want or need satellite communication.
Comparable services charge about $10-20 for a plan with a handful of messages and 50 cent per message in excess of that, and $50 or so for a monthly flat rate.
SOS is only possible with a monthly plan, but I‘d guess that Apple might make that one free (it wouldn‘t make for good press to hear of the inevitable lost hiker holding a fully charged iPhone but no emergency calling plan).
Yes, because satellite phones are not normal service. Both immersat and iridium connect 112 and 911 to their own operator who will then try to contact authorities where you tell them you are. I'm not surprised that this isn't available unless you're on a monthly plan.
> Both immersat and iridium connect 112 and 911 to their own operator
Not unless that’s changed recently. The last time I tried with Iridium (when in an actual emergency) calling 911 wasn’t supported in any capacity. I had to call someone else and have them relay my call.
> this article from 2014 says that all satellite providers support it
That link actually says only 2 of 4 supported 911/112 in 2014. It explicitly states:
> You will need to obtain the full international access code, country code, and phone number for the local fire, police, or ambulance depending upon the nature of the emergency and store it in your contacts.
for Thuraya and Globalstar (at least back then).
Either way, I said Iridium didn’t and apparently I was wrong (as my example was from 2016). Maybe I had a Globalstar phone that time? Iridium definitely didn’t in 2008 though.
Not sure, actually – I wouldn‘t be surprised if a helicopter would actually still appear if I‘d press the big red button on mine, but I haven‘t tried.
False alerts are probably a real concern. I had to provide two emergency contacts for the service I‘m using. The operators will call them before dispatching emergency services to catch accidental activations.
A big problem with stolen phones, is that the thieves are often kids, and use the 911 (999, in EU) feature to call in false emergency calls, as that is the only thing on a locked phone that works.
Really, phones are a bad bet, for stealing, these days; especially Apple kit.
With something like a Garmin inReach, the service is turned completely off if you're not subscribed, so even an SOS message wouldn't be transmitted through the satellite
I think SOS would almost have to be free on iPhones for the reason you stated. Besides, it would probably pay for itself because it would be such a great selling point. Could see a fair number of Android users switching for having emergency access available anywhere.
And it would be great free advertising. I'm just imagining the first news story with a lost hiker rescued because of their iPhone. It would make a big impact.
I am not so sure about the advertising. Apple is already doing that with people who get saved by the watch and those don't then to make huge splashy headlines.
the watch doesn't give you connectivity anywhere your phone wouldn't. the people being rescued because they called from help from their watch are being rescued from areas with good cell coverage, they just didn't bring their phone with them.
it's a different story if they're offering satellite connectivity.
> Could see a fair number of Android users switching
LOL. If Apple is getting this then Android will get this, if not sooner (think Google Fi), since this is built in the radio chip (something Apple still buys from 3rd party).
When I saw the headline my first thought was “are those the European gps satellites?"
It’s not - they’re called Galileo - but it made me think: do modern gps devices only connect to the American GPS satellites or has gps become a catch-all phrase for all the different systems and do iPhone read location from both?
Modern smartphones connect to at least three constellations these days (GPS, GLONASS and Galileo), but it‘s indeed become a term used to describe the entire family of technologies. The technical term would be GNSS (global navigation satellite system).
Assisted GPS is not (solely) the wifi/cell tower triangulation, it’s a technology that provides the receiver with an up to date GNSS satellite ephemeris to reduce time to first fix from minutes to seconds.
Because google phone is so much better? Even if you remove the google suite, it's still very much the wild wild west of privacy whenever you install an app.
There are other non-mainstream mobile platforms, not just iOS and Android.
Sure, they are not yet as polished as those where a cult like controll freak or a private data merchant dump a lot of money, but one has to start somewhere.
In economics terms, my preferences are not complete. You can look it up if you bother to understand why "if A is bad, I don't necessarily buy the alternative B".
In the space industry (specifically, the part of the industry that writes academic papers on global navigation), "GNSS" is used as the generic term, GPS means the American GPS.
Mobile ground stations (i.e. anything lighter than a few pound and using less than a few watt) will be L-band, and Starlink uses the much higher frequency Ka band (>= 20 GHz).
They also require quite sophisticated steering/beamforming.
Yes, this is a great idea and anyone going going off the grid should seriously consider something like this for que kings go sideways
Having it in an iPhone would make it much more accessible, although you can do this today with the likes of Garmin inReach.
Seems to me like the Globalstar Spot messaging service would be an easier service for Apple to support than satellite voice. It's useful for emergencies and other low-bandwidth communication
I'm going to call it exactly as I see it: This is fake.
1) LEO. Low Earth Orbit. Starlink is in a lower than usual orbit, and look at the immense effort/expense to make base station antennae that can reliably communicate with the satellites. They're not going to magically stuff that into an iPhone.
EDIT: Some replies have said "Hey, Iridium is LEO". The same antenna issue applies.
2) Bandwidth. Unless Apple has been secretly launching their own fleet of satellites, where are they getting the bandwidth? I doubt it's Starlink. Any incumbent satellite operators (such as Thuraya, mentioned in another comment) are in Geostationary orbit, not LEO. This requires an even better antenna. See #1.
I don't claim to be an expert in any of this, adding this capability an iPhone would be as disruptive as the iPhone itself was. Apple was able to keep the iPhone under wraps, but it's impossible to do that with satellite launches and FCC filings as we've learned with SpaceX. So for these reasons I call Fake. Maybe next decade.
It does say "phone calls and text" and not "internet", so Starlink probably isn't the best comparison. Iridium phones aren't that bulky these days. I'm also skeptical, but mostly about what the motivation would be to do it and who would pay for it.
I own both an Iridium phone and an Inmarsat phone, both are current gen. If you don’t consider them bulky, then you must be used to using an iPad/tablet as a phone. The antenna alone is longer than my iPhone 12 Max.
For one thing, I said phone as did GP I was replying too. That’s not a phone (aka needing a continuous real time connection), that’s a low bandwidth data transmitter (aka a best effort single transmission that can take multiple minutes to send). Even still, look at the size of the antenna on that. It’s definitely not all plastic there. If you’ve ever seen a tear down of a modern smart phone, you’ll realize 95% of the space is either battery or screen. The space used by antenna (which is often part of the outer metal ring) or circuit board is extremely small in comparison.
There are certainly other possible designs, as those creative frame-antennas that apple so infamously popularized with the iPhone 4. Iridium uses a 1.6 ghz signal, there's a lot of creative packaging that can be done at those frequencies.
And definitely, if this is in an iPhone, I'm sure it's low bandwidth use only.
> Here's the antenna inside. Looks like a small helical antenna.
Thanks for proving my point and saving me the hassle of looking up the antenna inside. There is no way that would fit inside an iPhone, even with Apple’s creativity in antenna design.
The frequency, as previously stated, is not the problem, it’s the transmission power. You need a lot more more watts of EIRP to transmit reliably 350 miles (distance to LEO) than you do for 3 miles (average distance to a cell tower). A modern smart phone transmits at about 100-200mW on average, Iridium operates at around 2 orders of magnitude higher transmit power than that.
Replacement batteries for the inreach mini online are labeled at 3.52Wh. The iPhone 12 has a 10.78 Wh battery.
The key to keeping power consumption low is that you transmit momentarily, not constantly.
A use case like backup communication on an iPhone wouldn’t necessitate use of the iridium network at 100% duty cycle.
> There is no way that would fit inside an iPhone, even with Apple’s creativity in antenna design.
The vast majority of the volume that a helical antenna consumes is empty space. The obvious solution is not groundbreakingly creative: try using something other than a helical antenna.
> A use case like backup communication on an iPhone wouldn’t necessitate use of the iridium network at 100% duty cycle.
The OP article explicitly says voice calls, which require a virtually 100% duty cycle. I entirely agree in an emergency beacon or maybe even messages capacity it’s potentially doable on an iPhone, but voice calls over satellite require a different antenna than is possible in the iPhone form factor. There’s been something like 50 satellite phones in common use, including at least one that is Android based, and the one thing that is constant across every single one of them is the size of the antenna, always requiring a large extension via fold or slide mechanism while a call is in progress.
I’ve personally owned over a dozen models of satellite devices (phones, beacons, terminals/hotspots, and two-way pagers) and used them on five continents, so I’m very familiar with the tech available in this space. There is just no existing satellite network that could support Apple’s iPhone footprint, even as a premium subscription add-on. There is zero chance Apple secretly and quietly launched their own satellite network, even just US based. Apple has also never been the lead adopter in any new radio technology / functionality (late to 3G, stalled on LTE due to early power usage issues, fairly behind even in 5G), especially one that is guaranteed to cause a hit to battery life in a big way, so I stand behind the statement this is a pipe dream for supporting voice calls.
> The vast majority of the volume that a helical antenna consumes is empty space. The obvious solution is not groundbreakingly creative: try using something other than a helical antenna.
There are only so many ways to make a circular polarized antenna (which is required to my knowledge for all existing sat networks). Yes, there are other ways besides helical antennas, but they still require much more space than is common to LTE/Wi-Fi/BT/BLE antennas used in phones.
The context was that my comment was in response to magically stuffing a 2 foot diameter Starlink antenna into an iPhone. Where the challenge is instead stuffing one of these into an iPhone: https://www.iridium.com/phones/
Look at the antenna on those (or any other satellite phone). When the antenna is extended (required for continuous transmission like with even a poor audio quality call), it’s HUGE compared to anything possible in an iPhone form factor.
Have you seen the antenna on Iridium devices? Think that's going to fly on an iPhone? Yes, we all know that there is existing technology, no need to ask rhetorical questions. Just saying "Iridium" doesn't solve the problems that still need to be solved, though.
Well it's a finger-sized antenna. Admittedly all I know about antennas is that size matters. An Iphone is bigger than a finger, why is it inconceivable that it could have a comparable antenna on its surface?
Also for an Iphone this would be just one rarely-used feature, it could get by with somewhat worse reception and lower bandwidth than a dedicated satellite phone.
Mobile phones used to have antennas like this in the early 2000s, and now they don‘t anymore. I don‘t know that much about antenna design, but I‘d suspect that there might be a similar opportunity here?
It'll be low bandwidth of course. The starlink antenna size is just to give more bandwidth. Bigger antenna means less error correction which means more bandwidth for other things. Voice compressed can be intelligible at 300bps. You can do that with a smaller antenna and more error correction. Mobile Satellite phones are already similar in size to other phones.
And how many iPhones are going to be used out of network?
I can see people paying an extreme rate of say 10$/minute with serious warnings in a true emergency. But worldwide it might only be 100 phones at a time even with 10’s of millions of iPhones. Meanwhile averaging 100 calls * 10$/ minute is 1/2 billion dollars a year which could pay for bandwidth on LEO satellites.
Those numbers are of course pulled from thin air, but iridium suffers because few are going to keep such expensive service on a just in case basis. However, the technology and economics are really close to working out.
I carry an iridium hotspot when away from civilization and I’d definitely use an eSIM in my iPhone to get access to LEO sms or voice calls in a pinch. One less device to carry.
Yes, but you used the comparison to Starlink receivers. Per-phone is all that matters to refute your receiver size concern.
The reporting suggests that Apple partnered with Globalstar for delivery. I don't think anyone is under any illusions that Apple suddenly launched a LEO fleet but there's a lot of providers of satellite mobile telephony in the space and Globalstar is one of them. Low bandwidth satellite does not take huge hardware anymore.
You can buy Iridium or Globalstar mobile hotspots that are handheld in size (e.g., Iridium Go!). Many trail runners carry Garmin InReach which is phone-sized.
I could see an external accessory (that you plug via the lightning port) that has a radio and external antenna to connect to sat networks. Maybe extra batteries too.
However, it's very un-apple-like to do something like that.
This. And it's not just that the starlink antenna is bigger; it also moves (virtually -- it's a phased array) to follow the moving satellite. Pointing at the satellite (either with motors or with phased array technology) is absolutely essential for high-bandwidth LEO. Iridium antennas don't follow the satellite; they're effectively omnidirectional so their gain and S/N ratio are terrible. And that's good enough for the 2400bps Iridium provides. But it's nowhere near what a 4G or 5G land-based connection provides to a normal smartphone.
Just throwing this out there; but with a handheld device, GPS, clock, known and predictable location of the sats, a high resolution accelerometer… wouldn’t it be possible to get the user to point to the sky and then send the message?
Small antenna, text only, etc. Seems like Apple could disrupt here, but I don’t know a ton on antenna design.
No. Your aim has to be much better than the human musculoskeletal system is capable of. Go outside on a dark night and point a laser pointer at a building 100 meters away. Hold it as steady as you can. Have a friend take a closeup video of the bright spot from 2 meters away. Notice how much the dot wobbles around.
Now imagine doing the same experiment where the dot is 540km away -- 5000 times farther. That's the altitude of a Starlink satellite. You might get lucky and sweep across the satellite once in a while but most of the time the beam will be many kilometers away from it.
It's not quite this bad; the beam will be fairly wide at 540km which makes the problem a little bit easier, but it's still basically impossible to hold the beam on the satellite for more than a few milliseconds.
And even that wouldn't work because you can't collect a strong enough signal from a satellite with an antenna the size of a cell phone. You need a parabolic dish or phased array about the size of a pizza box (minimum) to boost the gain enough. Satellites don't transmit with a lot of power, so your antenna needs a large area.
Good news: You don't have to do it this way. If you limit yourself to short text messages you don't have to aim the beam or use a lot of gain. That's how Iridium works.
But if you need a fatter pipe: Carry an antenna the size of a pizza box with you. Set it on the ground, let it acquire the satellite, then talk to it with your phone over wifi or bluetooth. Because this antenna uses closed loop feedback it can point very accurately at the satellite and stay locked on. This is basically how the Starlink antenna works, except Starlink would prefer that you not move the antenna from place to place (yet). And you'll need a big battery to power the antenna. It needs about 100 watts for transmitting; probably quite a bit less for receiving.
Satpaq is yet another short message service. It seems to use a semi-directional antenna. It doesn't require exact pointing because the bandwidth is very low. You cannot surf the web with it and you certainly cannot upload Youtube videos with it.
The only reason some pointing is required for Satpaq is that it uses GEO satellites which are a lot farther away than LEO, so concentrating most of the phone's energy into a cone a few thousand miles wide when it hits the satellite is necessary even for short messages. You need to do much, much better than this for high bandwidth applications.
GEO sats are also not a moving target; LEO sats are. That makes GEO slightly easier to point at, assuming you have a very wide beam which Satpaq does because it cannot possibly have a narrow one.
Again, high bandwidth satellite applications cannot work with such sloppy pointing mechanisms, and that limitation exists because of physics and information theory. It's not because "we just don't have good enough technology yet."
Beamforming techniques phones use to hit cell towers are not nearly good enough for satellites because satellites are so much farther away than cell towers. That means a satellite's transmitted energy is spread over a much wider area than a cell tower's is, and the ultra low power at which a phone transmits doesn't get a chance to spread out much before it hits the tower. You need a physically larger antenna when the thing you're pointing at is thousands of times farther away and you need to transmit with a lot more power. (Again, assuming you want the typical Youtube-style bandwidth cell phone users expect.)
> Mobile Satellite phones are already similar in size to other phones
As someone who owns a pretty big smartphone (iPhone 12 Pro Max) and both a current gen Iridium and Inmarsat phone (aka not a handheld two way pager, like the Garmin devices), I can assure you they aren’t similar in size in the slightest, even with the antenna stowed.
Agree. This might be planned for iPhone 14. And won’t have internet. Just low bandwidth apps. Like messaging and low quality phone calls. The only question is what will pricing look like. I’m betting free for emergency 🆘 and hourly for non emergency.
Power is not an issue for a very low-bandwidth system like Iridium, which only provides 2400bps. Starlink's bandwidth is 10,000x higher, and in a nutshell that's why they need a lot more power. Starlink also uses an active phased-array antenna, while Iridium uses a passive ("dumb") omnidirectional antenna. This also contributes to a greater power budget for Starlink.
The old cellular phones once had an external antennae too. But current modern cellular phones have managed to pack it internally. So perhaps this could be possible for satellite phones too, one day.
Technically, it may be possible but I think this is fake too - In India, you cannot own and operate a satellite phone without getting an NOC (no objection certificate) from the Home Ministry (who are in charge of internal security in india). Apple will not be able to sell its phone in India if it adds satellite telephony to it.
Most countries will react the same - no country likes to allow communication within its borders that it can't monitor (it's an obvious national security threat).
Worse, it's a crime to bring a satellite phone into India without first getting an NOC, and even then only ones that operate exclusively on INMARSAT will be authorized. China has a similar ban, so if this is real, traveling to China and India (among other countries) with an Apple device is going to turn into a legal minefield unless Apple has figured out something to work around that.
That...was like the whole point of my comment. Of course they're aware, and of course they aren't going to criminalize their users. This either isn't real, or Apple is going to figure something out to make it so this isn't a problem. What they can do to not criminalize their users is the really interesting question.
BTW, disabling illegal transmitting gear makes no difference to most authorities when importing. The only way to guarantee you won't get busted is to not import it in the first place.
I agree it's unlikely, but, not for technical reasons.
Iridium would work fine for this if you limit it to iMessage/SMS and anything else low-bandwidth (I would imagine they add 911/SOS support too).
I have a Garmin InReach which operates on Iridium, it's a 5+ year-old-device which works fine with Iridium in very challenging conditions and isn't very much larger than an iPhone.
Considering (some of) the commercial side of this, I strongly suspect the Iridium network has more than enough capacity for such a plan and Iridium could easily support it technically and they could work out some reasonable commercial terms with Apple for this. If Iridium doesn't want to work with Apple the company could surely be acquired for effectively pocket change by Apple and if they did release such hardware and charge a monthly subscription for "100% global coverage" it could be pretty quickly profitable.
But, with all of that said, I'm really not sure why Apple would want to do this. Like I said, I have an InReach, I'm commonly in areas with no cell service and so for me this would be a clear win and I would love it, but, I suspect I'm squarely in the minority.
Given the size of my Garmin 64st, I bet that most of that thickness is down case design. Apple sacrifices a lot of durability in the name of making the “thinnest iPhone ever”, while Garmin often goes in the exact opposite direction for fairly obvious reasons.
It’s chunky. Hard to say how much of that is radio and antenna. And folks in this discussion seem to forget the antenna, which is multiples of iPhone thickness.
It's chunky, but, it's older and made of plastic vs glass/metal and designed to be more resistant to drops/falls/damage. It's also a 6 year old design, technology has moved on.
My larger point being that I don't find it implausible that it could be done, since, 6-year-old technology was already close.
But it's still a somewhat larger device dedicated to a single function.
For me, I'm not sure I'd want inReach-type capability in my phone if it was another monthly subscription fee. I'd prefer a separate extremely rugged device given that, when I might really need it, there's a decent chance I'm in really crappy weather, have gloves on, my face covered, etc. Who wants to be fiddling with their phone under those conditions?
The problem with any "second device" is that it needs to be with you and charged up when you need it. My phone fits the bill already, so adding a fallback for ubiquitous basic connectivity would be a win.
When off, the battery seems to last "effectively forever" and when on it has "several days" of battery life even when doing constant communication with a satellite for location updates.
The most important use cases for the InReach are pretty specific though. I'm not likely to be strolling down the frozen food aisle in the local grocery store and suddenly wish I had my InReach on me. Sure, backup iMessage capability when I'm out of cell phone service range would be nice. But I'm not going to pay the amount that Garmin charges for that capability. (Though some people perhaps would if they routinely go places with no service.)
I don’t think you have to wait. I had some free time left on Apple TV+ when I subscribed to Apple One and then they started crediting me monthly for the value of the TV+ subscription.
Right. My point was that, if I'm going to pay a monthly satellite subscription fee one way or the other, I'm probably going to go with the separate device that is designed with wilderness situations in mind.
If the new phones can deliver near global coverage for SMS/iMesssage texts and findMy services then that is a huge selling point. Tapping into the rescue device market for hikers and backpackers is a huge business opportunity.
It is not that Apple isn't able to sell crap people don't really need. It is about creating the desire. Some others like the fact their phone cannot be located at will... I fear that is the smaller crowd. Sexy and smart, but small.
If I could just by an iPhone13 and not have to also have an inreach, that would sell me on it.
That's not a massive market segment for sure, but I know plenty of folks living in vans in southern Utah who likely would do the same; so there is an identifable market even if its small.
Small anecdote, I saw a girl’s life get saved by someone being smart enough to have an in-reach on them. Snowmobiling accident, got a helo to pick her out of the Idaho backcountry. No doubt in my mind she would be dead or severely disabled had it not been used to contact help.
Instant buy if they built iridium into an iPhone for emergency use… also… if they do that, invest in helicopter and life flight medical companies.
This year will be year 3 of me learning to ski. 65 days over the last two years. I really, really want to be in the back country.
Thankfully Utah's avalanche center does post mortem YT videos, cause damn that really tempers my drive to get out there.
Snow is so freekin' dangerous.
There is a long discussion on moutainproject about what folks carry in their first aid kits... TBH, given that "stabilize for definitive care" is pretty much the limit of what I can actually do, anything that decreases that time by any amount is probably the best first aid.
I can easily see how this would be much cheaper and better than inreach and similar, even at the low-end of the capabilities.
It's usually too late by the time help arrives in an avalanche scenario. If something happens you could have about 15 minutes to rescue your partner(s). You must NOT go alone. Get a course in snow rescue, find experienced people and go with them. Be alert. Always carry a basic avalanche rescue kit: a modern beacon, a probe and a shovel.
And, if you must, you could get a Cospas-Sarsat PLB in addition to your avalanche beacon.
Iridium receivers are already quite manageable in size. An ultra-low-bandwidth version with smaller, cheaper receivers as part of their new constellation doesn't seem that far fetched. You only need 4kbit/s or so (after all the iPhone has plenty of power to run a good voice codec).
You are right that transparent high-bandwidth satellite fall back is not in the cards at the moment. I will challenge you that high bandwidth is a hard requirement in this case. If Apple can integrate emergency short text + location capability at a low marginal cost, it will make iPhone platform more attractive to people who aspire spending time outside of cell coverage.
First, let's examine some limitations we are dealing with:
1. On the receiving side the trade is power projected on the receiving terminal vs bandwidth. At lower bandwidth we can have quite reasonable power requirements, think GPS antennas. High bandwidth applications are all limited by FCC power per cm2 projection limits. Without those limits LEO satellites could focus transmit onto a much smaller area and enable high-bandwidth receivers that are basically cell-phone sized. Given that GPS is a thing, we can definitely have low-bandwidth phone integrated satellite antenna.
Overall, I think it is quite unlikely that Apple is adding a dedicated on-handset satellite coms. It is possible, maybe even likely, they will be enhancing existing satellite communication capability or adding external devices. Even if they are enhancing satellite coms the provider is definitely not Starlink because phased array power requirements are staggering for mobile applications. So, assuming there is some truth to this leak, it is maybe 1, probably not 3, and almost definitely not 2:
1. Upgrading the existing GPS capability with new antenna / silicon. Most likely to support other positioning constellations https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-competitors-to-GPS, but in era of SDRs maybe sat signals in general.
2. The claim specifically talks about phone/text calls, to make that happen they will either need to integrate with Iridium or back a new not yet deployed service. On Iridium front there are a couple of problems, but they don't seem insurmountable: Iridium modems are expensive and iPhone power/thermal requirements will mean developing logic that is significantly better than anything on the market. Of course Iridium IP licensing or company acquisition would be big news breaking quite a bit before we see any devices, so this is almost certainly not happening.
3. First party integration of external satellite antenna into iPhone ecosystem. Introducing Apple emergency beacon. Deploy this beacon anywhere in the world and get emergency communications for affordable* price. Basically a modern, Apple sleek, version of https://www.iridium.com/blog/2012/05/23/iridium-connected-de... .
$ASTS and others are launching large LEO constellations starting in March from what I understand. They have major partnerships with Vodafone, AT&T, and more.
> Unless Apple has been secretly launching their own fleet of satellites, where are they getting the bandwidth?
For text messages or sending an emergency beacon signal, you don't need much bandwidth.
The surprise is Kuo specifying voice over IP as a supported feature, but modern codecs can really squeeze voice down now days.
>Lyra, which is now hosted on GitHub, can compress audio down to as little as 3 kilobits per second while still ensuring a sound quality that compares well with other codecs that require much greater bandwidth.
Satellite phone systems are using 2.4 kbps codecs, so while Lyra might significantly raise the voice quality bar, it would not really change the bandwidth requirements.
I don't know if you are right or not. But what you are saying reminds me of I think it was the 70's when someone who was involved in early trunked car phones told me that there was no way a phone could be portable that it would take to much power to be in a light enough form factor.
I agree it's fake, there is phones on the market that has phone and internet via satellite but you need a subscription and it's expensive. The average Joe don't have that. I think this is a PR-trick to suggest Apple is relevant and innovative, Apple after Jobs is safe and predictable and not exciting like this
You guys are forgetting that Apple is turning into a service company and already has a subscription product (Apple One) that the average joe may be subscribed to.
And how is the M1 chip not an innovation on its own ?
I think this is more likely incorrectly understood leaks. Similar to what occurred with the Nintendo Switch OLED. My guess is the chips and whatnot the iPhone will use will support this but Apple won’t enable it in the software.
I believe this is equivalent to fm radio capabilities in some of the iPhone chips
> They're not going to magically stuff that into an iPhone.
This sounds a bit like Ed Colligan's immortal "they're not going to just walk in."
The thing is, you're right, of course they're not going to just tweak a few things and somehow fit a satellite antenna into a phone. They're going to put Apple-level resources into recruiting a team of the field's leading experts and funding them for years to do it.
As you say, this would be a genuinely disruptive development in mobile tech. It seems at very least plausible that Apple would see this as a problem worth throwing a spare billion at solving.
» This sounds a bit like Ed Colligan's immortal "they're not going to just walk in."
Some context for others like me
> Sarah Jane Tribble and Dean Takahashi, reporting for the San Jose Mercury News on Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s remarks two weeks ago regarding Apple’s prospects in the mobile phone market:
» Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.
» “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
I think 1 and 2 are connected. Apple sees the cellular communication game from the perspective of their ecosystem. Improving network agnosticism is supportive of that perspective. We see that Apple wants to deliver a premium experience for a premium price. I assume that LEO or Lower than LEO communications could be supported by auxiliary products. A small "hotspot" type device(comm array) to couple with the Apple ecosystem? This future proofs the ecosystem to partner with a communications swarm or launch their own as launch prices drop.
I'd say it is possible in the context of what I stated. But, the article's characterization seems too good to be true.
I've been following this tech for a while and I assure you it's being worked on and looked at seriously.
I absolutely think it will exist in the future. Likely for very low bandwidth text messaging or maybe very low quality calls. Obviously, it will only work outside with line of site.
I don't think it's ready for the next iPhone though. I would be very shocked and surprised if this capability was on the iPhone 13, not surprised if on the 14.
Let's reserve words like "fake" for knowingly misleading or malicious misinformation. This might be wrong or misunderstood but I'm pretty sure it's not deliberate lies.
So much of the comments so far have focussed on two things: 1. The size of the antennae and 2. The huge cost of bandwidth on satellite services.
For 1, who's to say there isn't an add-on antenna planned? The news is about the baseband support. Knowing Apple they will sell a hugely expensive add-on antenna which connects via magsafe. This does not indicate the news is wrong.
For 2, obviously carriers or maybe Apple itself will have to organise the auth/payment arrangements to actually make use of this new capability. This also seems doable and is not a blocker, it means, this will not be some automatic free things users can just use on day one.
None of these points really strike me as showstoppers and certainly do not warrant claims of "fake!".
Here's what is actually being reported: the iPhone 13 will have the technical capability to connect, using some yet to be released antenna adapter, via some yet to be announced plans or arrangements, in some yet to be described capacity, to LEO satellite services.
> I don't claim to be an expert in any of this, adding this capability an iPhone would be as disruptive as the iPhone itself was.
Would it really? I think satellite communication is something interesting in the outback in some regions where conventional signals aren't available.
Technically GPS is also unidirectional satellite communication, I guess. There are also personal locator beacons for emergencies. Don't really see the application. Maybe the first Apple smartphone gen has reached arthritis-age and goes on cruises?
Interesting! I dug into this a bit and it seems this has been brewing in the 5G standard for the past few years and was specifically included in Release 17. Qualcomm seems to have been working closely with both Iridium and Globalstar. Iridium just finished launching it's Next constellation with 5G support to mobile phones one of the goals. Qualcomm had planned to include NTN (Non-Terrestrial-Networks) in the X65 5G modem with band n53 support. The frequency bands are in the s-band, putting it in the 1-2 GHz range. It's possible Qualcomm will be capable of connecting to multiple satellite providers. I see no mention of bandwidth, so it's probably terrible.
This doesn't seem to be Apple's tech specifically, but they could have some interesting things to add to the service bundling and what applications would actually benefit from this connection.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I am expecting something on the order of text-only iMessages for a low monthly fee.
>Last year Lynk — then called Ubiquitilink — showed that, from now on, every phone can be a satellite phone. But they’ve spent the last year honing the product and have just demonstrated the real thing: Sending a plain old text message from a “cell tower in space” to a normal phone on the surface.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadAlso seems implausible when the 13 is already in volume manufacturing and this is the first we’ve heard of it…
It‘s just the spectrum that is very, very expensive (due to a cell being hundreds of kilometers in diameter).
Smallest devices being able to access satcom were the size of a pager 15 years ago, and most functioned like that.
Power envelopes definitely allow for that, especially if you only need to send individual messages of few hundred kilobytes.
I was quite happy to read this news simply for the fact that if true it should hopefully cut into the arm-and-leg price Garmin charges for me to use my InReach to access the satellite network.
> 5.17 x 9.90 x 2.61 cm
That's the same order of magnitude of volume as a phone.
If this was baked into an iPhone I doubt the server would be cheaper.
The part of this article about FaceTime calls over satellite sounds like editorialization, though. FaceTime requires a relatively large amount of bandwidth to pull off, which isn’t in the realm of possibility with current systems.
The frequency isn’t the issue, it’s the distance it needs to transmit. Increased output power/longer distance needs a bigger antenna. Iridium / Starlink / other LEO satellites are >300 miles above the earth. Your smartphone doesn’t have even remotely enough power to transmit that far, good luck getting even 1/10th that distance for even a very shaky connection.
As a concrete example, your phone’s cell radio transmits at 100-200mW into an antenna which has minimal additional gain. Iridium / Inmarsat phones transmit at around 10W into a higher gain and significantly larger antenna. That’s two orders of magnitude more EIRP in the end.
Apple might be able to do an emergency beacon like transmission from an iPhone into LEO, but assuredly can not do a continuous transmission like in a phone call, even at very poor audio quality, without a relatively massive change in phone dimensions.
In any case iridium devices usually output max 2w. Same as 4G.
Not according to Iridium’s data sheets I just read and provided values in my post
> Same as 4G
Nope, back in AMPS days power could be up to 2W, but 4G UEs are almost always limited to a maximum of 23dBm (aka 200mW).
> Transmit power has nothing to do with antenna length.
Correct if you are purely talking about antenna design from a generic pov. In the case of a phone, it does matter because you can’t transmit 10W into an omnidirectional antenna pressed up against someone’s ear due to current regulations, so it necessitates moving the antenna further away (hence one reason sat phones have a “whip antenna”, but there are other reasons too). This effectively makes the antenna “larger”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuraya
Theye recently got Android phones too https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thuraya-X5-Touch-Satellite-Phone/dp...
My bet is on Iridium (or possibly Globalstar, although that would be a pretty un-Apple like compromise in quality too).
Inmarsat is the only other option, but I think antenna size/directionality would exclude that as well.
It may sound super counterintuitive, but providing a stable link to a geosynchronous satellite on a handheld hardware with tiny antenna is easier than with fast flying low earth orbit satellites.
And I doubt't that voice communications, or even Internet service would be there, just SMS, or pager like functionality most likelly.
Iridium modems are among the smallest satellite transceivers available, much smaller than GEO ones.
Looking at something like the Garmin InReach shows what‘s possible with Iridium, and I imagine Apple would be throwing a lot more money at the technical/design constraints.
GSM phones used to have large external antennas too, until one day they simply didn‘t anymore.
Than system communicating with geostationary sats.
Training the circuitry onto one weak, but stable satellite signal is much easier than keeping readjusting, or communicting with multiple satellites at once.
Just like with the GPS, the trick is the super duper accurate, and stable frequency reference.
I know of one place where Apple does this: in China, and only China, you can buy an iPhone with two physical SIM slots. You can do Dual SIM on iPhones elsewhere, but only with an eSIM.
Features:
- Released end of 2018
- 2GB RAM, 16GB storage
- Android 7.1
- $1,200
- C H O N K score: 2.46cm thick
As to why: Indian customs officers confiscating all iPhones is probably bad for business (in the long term).
Edit: to clarify India banned satcom devices
...this was also part of the plot of Independence Day.
I don't think they can tractably do that. If India started shooting down US satellites they'd be in for a whole world of problems.
At a minimum, it is effective enough that it is a response that would be expected to be elicited if a government found a device undesirable.
You can just about jam GPS signals locally (within a few km if you pour the resources into it.) Nations are not able in practice to generally jam satellite signals.
We know that nations are not able to do this in practice... because it's how people from those locations are calling out to us.
You don’t. You prevent people from getting access to the device in the first place. There are no countries where people already have iPhone 13s. A country that doesn’t want them, could certainly ban their import.
There ain’t too many people watching HBO on their satellite TVs in North Korea.
Exactly.
> There are no countries where people already have iPhone 13s.
They have Iridium, Garmin, etc. Any number of satellite devices.
> A country that doesn’t want them, could certainly ban their import.
I think you're super-naive if you think import bans on these devices work in practice, sorry. They're easily concealable.
But if these countries do nothing and change nothing, this feature means that it would be prohibited to bring iPhone 13s in the country without special permits.
At least you‘ll be able to resell it to Android users :)
This is still a rumour after all.
>With the screen still holding strong, we decided to go even higher, using a step ladder to reach nine feet.
...the screen still looked like new after three back-to-back drops from nine feet
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/iphone-12-scratch-drop-test...
The mini can last for days, or even weeks between charges and is extremely rugged.
Have we?
I‘m actually glad they are using the space for something I‘d actually be using, and I doubt that I am the minority in this.
> now suddenly there's room for a satellite radio and antenna?
It wouldn‘t be a new baseband or probably even transceiver. Iridium is 1.5 GHz, which is probably covered by one of the existing power amplifiers, and the radio technology is pretty similar to GSM and probably integrated into the existing baseband.
But thank you, I’d never heard of those before.
You can activate a GPS-located SOS and send messages home to check in.
I feel massively safer having this beacon in my pack. It also makes a great, albeit expensive, gift for friends who are similarly active.
Just because it's possible doesn't mean it actually happened.
The official webpage with absolutely no interesting information: https://www.breitling.com/us-en/emergency/
There are a few blurry fractions of a second of the antenna being deployed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJvyZNHnMGE
What it sounds like over a radio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlC5frFhjqs
It comes with a tester (basically a radio with no tuning knob): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3R7lhLqVo8
Edit: I found some more footage of it being used in this highly dramatic, uh, presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2y-TQSL6XE
https://youtu.be/qHRzUTyi1GE
They appear to have reused that footage in another episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgRom5gINtI
Yes, and no. it depends on the frequency.
However I don't want to put a phased array shitting out 4-15 watts of power at 1.6gigs near my head. I doubt it'll pass the emissions certification either.
And would there be free SOS emergency service? Seems like that would be a huge selling point to get people to upgrade. People who wouldn't otherwise want or need satellite communication.
SOS is only possible with a monthly plan, but I‘d guess that Apple might make that one free (it wouldn‘t make for good press to hear of the inevitable lost hiker holding a fully charged iPhone but no emergency calling plan).
Is that allowed? In normal cell coverage areas, emergency calls are routed by law even without a SIM card.
Not unless that’s changed recently. The last time I tried with Iridium (when in an actual emergency) calling 911 wasn’t supported in any capacity. I had to call someone else and have them relay my call.
https://gtc.co.uk/blog/2014/02/19/how-to-call-emergency-numb...
That link actually says only 2 of 4 supported 911/112 in 2014. It explicitly states:
> You will need to obtain the full international access code, country code, and phone number for the local fire, police, or ambulance depending upon the nature of the emergency and store it in your contacts.
for Thuraya and Globalstar (at least back then).
Either way, I said Iridium didn’t and apparently I was wrong (as my example was from 2016). Maybe I had a Globalstar phone that time? Iridium definitely didn’t in 2008 though.
False alerts are probably a real concern. I had to provide two emergency contacts for the service I‘m using. The operators will call them before dispatching emergency services to catch accidental activations.
Really, phones are a bad bet, for stealing, these days; especially Apple kit.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112_(emergency_telephone_numbe...
And it would be great free advertising. I'm just imagining the first news story with a lost hiker rescued because of their iPhone. It would make a big impact.
it's a different story if they're offering satellite connectivity.
LOL. If Apple is getting this then Android will get this, if not sooner (think Google Fi), since this is built in the radio chip (something Apple still buys from 3rd party).
You can get them used for 700 usd
It’s not - they’re called Galileo - but it made me think: do modern gps devices only connect to the American GPS satellites or has gps become a catch-all phrase for all the different systems and do iPhone read location from both?
iPhones support GPS, Galileo (ESA), GLONASS (Roscosmos), QZSS (JAXA) and so-called assisted GPS – location computed from cell towers.
Modern "GPS" chipsets work with multiple SatNav systems. My phone has GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou and Galileo capability.
Sure, they are not yet as polished as those where a cult like controll freak or a private data merchant dump a lot of money, but one has to start somewhere.
Mobile ground stations (i.e. anything lighter than a few pound and using less than a few watt) will be L-band, and Starlink uses the much higher frequency Ka band (>= 20 GHz).
They also require quite sophisticated steering/beamforming.
I’m picturing for hiking or kayaking alone in remote areas.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-20/apple-has...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPOT_Satellite_Messenger
1) LEO. Low Earth Orbit. Starlink is in a lower than usual orbit, and look at the immense effort/expense to make base station antennae that can reliably communicate with the satellites. They're not going to magically stuff that into an iPhone.
EDIT: Some replies have said "Hey, Iridium is LEO". The same antenna issue applies.
2) Bandwidth. Unless Apple has been secretly launching their own fleet of satellites, where are they getting the bandwidth? I doubt it's Starlink. Any incumbent satellite operators (such as Thuraya, mentioned in another comment) are in Geostationary orbit, not LEO. This requires an even better antenna. See #1.
I don't claim to be an expert in any of this, adding this capability an iPhone would be as disruptive as the iPhone itself was. Apple was able to keep the iPhone under wraps, but it's impossible to do that with satellite launches and FCC filings as we've learned with SpaceX. So for these reasons I call Fake. Maybe next decade.
I own both an Iridium phone and an Inmarsat phone, both are current gen. If you don’t consider them bulky, then you must be used to using an iPad/tablet as a phone. The antenna alone is longer than my iPhone 12 Max.
And how much of that is just the IPX7 case?
https://fccid.io/img.php?id=1547768&img=bg1.png
There are certainly other possible designs, as those creative frame-antennas that apple so infamously popularized with the iPhone 4. Iridium uses a 1.6 ghz signal, there's a lot of creative packaging that can be done at those frequencies.
And definitely, if this is in an iPhone, I'm sure it's low bandwidth use only.
Thanks for proving my point and saving me the hassle of looking up the antenna inside. There is no way that would fit inside an iPhone, even with Apple’s creativity in antenna design.
The frequency, as previously stated, is not the problem, it’s the transmission power. You need a lot more more watts of EIRP to transmit reliably 350 miles (distance to LEO) than you do for 3 miles (average distance to a cell tower). A modern smart phone transmits at about 100-200mW on average, Iridium operates at around 2 orders of magnitude higher transmit power than that.
The key to keeping power consumption low is that you transmit momentarily, not constantly.
A use case like backup communication on an iPhone wouldn’t necessitate use of the iridium network at 100% duty cycle.
> There is no way that would fit inside an iPhone, even with Apple’s creativity in antenna design.
The vast majority of the volume that a helical antenna consumes is empty space. The obvious solution is not groundbreakingly creative: try using something other than a helical antenna.
The OP article explicitly says voice calls, which require a virtually 100% duty cycle. I entirely agree in an emergency beacon or maybe even messages capacity it’s potentially doable on an iPhone, but voice calls over satellite require a different antenna than is possible in the iPhone form factor. There’s been something like 50 satellite phones in common use, including at least one that is Android based, and the one thing that is constant across every single one of them is the size of the antenna, always requiring a large extension via fold or slide mechanism while a call is in progress.
I’ve personally owned over a dozen models of satellite devices (phones, beacons, terminals/hotspots, and two-way pagers) and used them on five continents, so I’m very familiar with the tech available in this space. There is just no existing satellite network that could support Apple’s iPhone footprint, even as a premium subscription add-on. There is zero chance Apple secretly and quietly launched their own satellite network, even just US based. Apple has also never been the lead adopter in any new radio technology / functionality (late to 3G, stalled on LTE due to early power usage issues, fairly behind even in 5G), especially one that is guaranteed to cause a hit to battery life in a big way, so I stand behind the statement this is a pipe dream for supporting voice calls.
> The vast majority of the volume that a helical antenna consumes is empty space. The obvious solution is not groundbreakingly creative: try using something other than a helical antenna.
There are only so many ways to make a circular polarized antenna (which is required to my knowledge for all existing sat networks). Yes, there are other ways besides helical antennas, but they still require much more space than is common to LTE/Wi-Fi/BT/BLE antennas used in phones.
Still challenging, but maybe not impossible.
I would argue that you’ve just illustrated my point. It also wouldn’t take a lot to convince me that you’re being facetious.
The list is endless.
I can see people paying an extreme rate of say 10$/minute with serious warnings in a true emergency. But worldwide it might only be 100 phones at a time even with 10’s of millions of iPhones. Meanwhile averaging 100 calls * 10$/ minute is 1/2 billion dollars a year which could pay for bandwidth on LEO satellites.
Those numbers are of course pulled from thin air, but iridium suffers because few are going to keep such expensive service on a just in case basis. However, the technology and economics are really close to working out.
Yes, but you used the comparison to Starlink receivers. Per-phone is all that matters to refute your receiver size concern.
The reporting suggests that Apple partnered with Globalstar for delivery. I don't think anyone is under any illusions that Apple suddenly launched a LEO fleet but there's a lot of providers of satellite mobile telephony in the space and Globalstar is one of them. Low bandwidth satellite does not take huge hardware anymore.
You can buy Iridium or Globalstar mobile hotspots that are handheld in size (e.g., Iridium Go!). Many trail runners carry Garmin InReach which is phone-sized.
However, it's very un-apple-like to do something like that.
Small antenna, text only, etc. Seems like Apple could disrupt here, but I don’t know a ton on antenna design.
Now imagine doing the same experiment where the dot is 540km away -- 5000 times farther. That's the altitude of a Starlink satellite. You might get lucky and sweep across the satellite once in a while but most of the time the beam will be many kilometers away from it.
It's not quite this bad; the beam will be fairly wide at 540km which makes the problem a little bit easier, but it's still basically impossible to hold the beam on the satellite for more than a few milliseconds.
And even that wouldn't work because you can't collect a strong enough signal from a satellite with an antenna the size of a cell phone. You need a parabolic dish or phased array about the size of a pizza box (minimum) to boost the gain enough. Satellites don't transmit with a lot of power, so your antenna needs a large area.
Good news: You don't have to do it this way. If you limit yourself to short text messages you don't have to aim the beam or use a lot of gain. That's how Iridium works.
But if you need a fatter pipe: Carry an antenna the size of a pizza box with you. Set it on the ground, let it acquire the satellite, then talk to it with your phone over wifi or bluetooth. Because this antenna uses closed loop feedback it can point very accurately at the satellite and stay locked on. This is basically how the Starlink antenna works, except Starlink would prefer that you not move the antenna from place to place (yet). And you'll need a big battery to power the antenna. It needs about 100 watts for transmitting; probably quite a bit less for receiving.
> Your aim has to be much better than the human musculoskeletal system is capable of.
> You need a parabolic dish or phased array about the size of a pizza box (minimum) to boost the gain enough.
No – there even is a very specific counterexample: https://satpaq.com/
I doubt that Apple would use that approach, though. If anything, I'd imagine that they'd use existing (for 802.11 and LTE) beamforming capabilities.
The only reason some pointing is required for Satpaq is that it uses GEO satellites which are a lot farther away than LEO, so concentrating most of the phone's energy into a cone a few thousand miles wide when it hits the satellite is necessary even for short messages. You need to do much, much better than this for high bandwidth applications.
GEO sats are also not a moving target; LEO sats are. That makes GEO slightly easier to point at, assuming you have a very wide beam which Satpaq does because it cannot possibly have a narrow one.
Again, high bandwidth satellite applications cannot work with such sloppy pointing mechanisms, and that limitation exists because of physics and information theory. It's not because "we just don't have good enough technology yet."
Beamforming techniques phones use to hit cell towers are not nearly good enough for satellites because satellites are so much farther away than cell towers. That means a satellite's transmitted energy is spread over a much wider area than a cell tower's is, and the ultra low power at which a phone transmits doesn't get a chance to spread out much before it hits the tower. You need a physically larger antenna when the thing you're pointing at is thousands of times farther away and you need to transmit with a lot more power. (Again, assuming you want the typical Youtube-style bandwidth cell phone users expect.)
As someone who owns a pretty big smartphone (iPhone 12 Pro Max) and both a current gen Iridium and Inmarsat phone (aka not a handheld two way pager, like the Garmin devices), I can assure you they aren’t similar in size in the slightest, even with the antenna stowed.
Technically, it may be possible but I think this is fake too - In India, you cannot own and operate a satellite phone without getting an NOC (no objection certificate) from the Home Ministry (who are in charge of internal security in india). Apple will not be able to sell its phone in India if it adds satellite telephony to it.
Most countries will react the same - no country likes to allow communication within its borders that it can't monitor (it's an obvious national security threat).
That...was like the whole point of my comment. Of course they're aware, and of course they aren't going to criminalize their users. This either isn't real, or Apple is going to figure something out to make it so this isn't a problem. What they can do to not criminalize their users is the really interesting question.
BTW, disabling illegal transmitting gear makes no difference to most authorities when importing. The only way to guarantee you won't get busted is to not import it in the first place.
Phones are hard to differentiate these days, but "can be reached anywhere, always, no matter what" may be the last big differentiator left.
Iridium would work fine for this if you limit it to iMessage/SMS and anything else low-bandwidth (I would imagine they add 911/SOS support too).
I have a Garmin InReach which operates on Iridium, it's a 5+ year-old-device which works fine with Iridium in very challenging conditions and isn't very much larger than an iPhone.
Considering (some of) the commercial side of this, I strongly suspect the Iridium network has more than enough capacity for such a plan and Iridium could easily support it technically and they could work out some reasonable commercial terms with Apple for this. If Iridium doesn't want to work with Apple the company could surely be acquired for effectively pocket change by Apple and if they did release such hardware and charge a monthly subscription for "100% global coverage" it could be pretty quickly profitable.
But, with all of that said, I'm really not sure why Apple would want to do this. Like I said, I have an InReach, I'm commonly in areas with no cell service and so for me this would be a clear win and I would love it, but, I suspect I'm squarely in the minority.
The photo seems to indicate the InReach is 3-4x as thick as an iPhone. I couldn’t find specs. Would you care to share the actual size?
It’s chunky. Hard to say how much of that is radio and antenna. And folks in this discussion seem to forget the antenna, which is multiples of iPhone thickness.
https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/592606#specs
My larger point being that I don't find it implausible that it could be done, since, 6-year-old technology was already close.
For me, I'm not sure I'd want inReach-type capability in my phone if it was another monthly subscription fee. I'd prefer a separate extremely rugged device given that, when I might really need it, there's a decent chance I'm in really crappy weather, have gloves on, my face covered, etc. Who wants to be fiddling with their phone under those conditions?
When off, the battery seems to last "effectively forever" and when on it has "several days" of battery life even when doing constant communication with a satellite for location updates.
Something people should consider when they read the words “rugged”, it’s not always about cracking/breaking.
Would that be even noticeable on Apple's Income statement?
How big is this market?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-26/apple-con...
If I could just by an iPhone13 and not have to also have an inreach, that would sell me on it.
That's not a massive market segment for sure, but I know plenty of folks living in vans in southern Utah who likely would do the same; so there is an identifable market even if its small.
Instant buy if they built iridium into an iPhone for emergency use… also… if they do that, invest in helicopter and life flight medical companies.
Thankfully Utah's avalanche center does post mortem YT videos, cause damn that really tempers my drive to get out there.
Snow is so freekin' dangerous.
There is a long discussion on moutainproject about what folks carry in their first aid kits... TBH, given that "stabilize for definitive care" is pretty much the limit of what I can actually do, anything that decreases that time by any amount is probably the best first aid.
I can easily see how this would be much cheaper and better than inreach and similar, even at the low-end of the capabilities.
And, if you must, you could get a Cospas-Sarsat PLB in addition to your avalanche beacon.
First, let's examine some limitations we are dealing with:
1. On the receiving side the trade is power projected on the receiving terminal vs bandwidth. At lower bandwidth we can have quite reasonable power requirements, think GPS antennas. High bandwidth applications are all limited by FCC power per cm2 projection limits. Without those limits LEO satellites could focus transmit onto a much smaller area and enable high-bandwidth receivers that are basically cell-phone sized. Given that GPS is a thing, we can definitely have low-bandwidth phone integrated satellite antenna.
2. On the transmit side primary trade is again transmit power vs bandwidth. Iridium phones are a thing https://www.iridium.com/products/iridium-extreme/, so low bandwith transmit is feasible.
Overall, I think it is quite unlikely that Apple is adding a dedicated on-handset satellite coms. It is possible, maybe even likely, they will be enhancing existing satellite communication capability or adding external devices. Even if they are enhancing satellite coms the provider is definitely not Starlink because phased array power requirements are staggering for mobile applications. So, assuming there is some truth to this leak, it is maybe 1, probably not 3, and almost definitely not 2:
1. Upgrading the existing GPS capability with new antenna / silicon. Most likely to support other positioning constellations https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-competitors-to-GPS, but in era of SDRs maybe sat signals in general.
2. The claim specifically talks about phone/text calls, to make that happen they will either need to integrate with Iridium or back a new not yet deployed service. On Iridium front there are a couple of problems, but they don't seem insurmountable: Iridium modems are expensive and iPhone power/thermal requirements will mean developing logic that is significantly better than anything on the market. Of course Iridium IP licensing or company acquisition would be big news breaking quite a bit before we see any devices, so this is almost certainly not happening.
3. First party integration of external satellite antenna into iPhone ecosystem. Introducing Apple emergency beacon. Deploy this beacon anywhere in the world and get emergency communications for affordable* price. Basically a modern, Apple sleek, version of https://www.iridium.com/blog/2012/05/23/iridium-connected-de... .
For text messages or sending an emergency beacon signal, you don't need much bandwidth.
The surprise is Kuo specifying voice over IP as a supported feature, but modern codecs can really squeeze voice down now days.
>Lyra, which is now hosted on GitHub, can compress audio down to as little as 3 kilobits per second while still ensuring a sound quality that compares well with other codecs that require much greater bandwidth.
https://siliconangle.com/2021/04/06/google-open-sources-lyra...
And how is the M1 chip not an innovation on its own ?
I believe this is equivalent to fm radio capabilities in some of the iPhone chips
This sounds a bit like Ed Colligan's immortal "they're not going to just walk in."
The thing is, you're right, of course they're not going to just tweak a few things and somehow fit a satellite antenna into a phone. They're going to put Apple-level resources into recruiting a team of the field's leading experts and funding them for years to do it.
As you say, this would be a genuinely disruptive development in mobile tech. It seems at very least plausible that Apple would see this as a problem worth throwing a spare billion at solving.
Some context for others like me
> Sarah Jane Tribble and Dean Takahashi, reporting for the San Jose Mercury News on Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s remarks two weeks ago regarding Apple’s prospects in the mobile phone market:
» Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.
» “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
https://daringfireball.net/2006/11/colligan_head_stuck
I'd say it is possible in the context of what I stated. But, the article's characterization seems too good to be true.
I absolutely think it will exist in the future. Likely for very low bandwidth text messaging or maybe very low quality calls. Obviously, it will only work outside with line of site.
I don't think it's ready for the next iPhone though. I would be very shocked and surprised if this capability was on the iPhone 13, not surprised if on the 14.
Let's reserve words like "fake" for knowingly misleading or malicious misinformation. This might be wrong or misunderstood but I'm pretty sure it's not deliberate lies.
So much of the comments so far have focussed on two things: 1. The size of the antennae and 2. The huge cost of bandwidth on satellite services.
For 1, who's to say there isn't an add-on antenna planned? The news is about the baseband support. Knowing Apple they will sell a hugely expensive add-on antenna which connects via magsafe. This does not indicate the news is wrong.
For 2, obviously carriers or maybe Apple itself will have to organise the auth/payment arrangements to actually make use of this new capability. This also seems doable and is not a blocker, it means, this will not be some automatic free things users can just use on day one.
None of these points really strike me as showstoppers and certainly do not warrant claims of "fake!".
Here's what is actually being reported: the iPhone 13 will have the technical capability to connect, using some yet to be released antenna adapter, via some yet to be announced plans or arrangements, in some yet to be described capacity, to LEO satellite services.
Would it really? I think satellite communication is something interesting in the outback in some regions where conventional signals aren't available.
Technically GPS is also unidirectional satellite communication, I guess. There are also personal locator beacons for emergencies. Don't really see the application. Maybe the first Apple smartphone gen has reached arthritis-age and goes on cruises?
This doesn't seem to be Apple's tech specifically, but they could have some interesting things to add to the service bundling and what applications would actually benefit from this connection.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I am expecting something on the order of text-only iMessages for a low monthly fee.
>Last year Lynk — then called Ubiquitilink — showed that, from now on, every phone can be a satellite phone. But they’ve spent the last year honing the product and have just demonstrated the real thing: Sending a plain old text message from a “cell tower in space” to a normal phone on the surface.