>On Monday, January 8, the Starlink team successfully sent and received our first text messages using T-Mobile network spectrum through one of our new Direct to Cell satellites launched six days prior. Connecting cell phones to satellites has several major challenges to overcome.
FOR decades I have wanted a modern Pager - an SMS ONLY device,.
Before Android, there were a few devices that were headed there, but the hiptop made it for a while and Danger begat Android (and a $200 million dollar exit for Rubin)...
But you know what device is PERFECT for this:
HOT BUNNY 1 [0]
but modified to have a thin connection via starlink - if mods are required.
So that when operational service is announced by their partners, they have a meaningful announcement that will get worthwhile press attention.
e.g. T-Mobile and Samsung might trot this out together (to counter Apple's announcement of emergency text for help by different means). It'll work better than if all the keywords have already occurred in media articles; it'll work especially better if they were testing on weird/old development phones or phones from different vendors than their chosen highlighted partners.
Basically there's no upside in disclosing equipment, and there's a lot of ways it can be unfortunate.
I’m almost certain it won’t be actually unmodified smartphones. At least some baseband and/or anpplic layer adaptation seems necessary in order to not waste all bandwidth on signaling and overhead.
Probably not Androids. I don't think any android supports sat comm right now especially after Qualcomm abandoned it's chip/radio effort so it's not included in most common SoCs.
Ahhh I misread the article then! And Woah ok, I genuinely didn't think that would be possible without phased arrays like starlink uses for its normal service. Amazing!
I don't know if this has been announced before: "Operators in our network have access to reciprocal global access that allows their users to access the service when they travel to one of our partner countries." [1]
It sounds like once SpaceX has partnered with at least one carrier in most countries then you'll be able to travel to almost any point on the surface of the Earth and still have baseline emergency cell texting coverage, the only requirement being a decent view of the sky. This is going to save lives. I hope they are also allowed to make it work in places without carriers, like international waters and Antarctica.
I assume this works like traditional cellular roaming, no? So this would mean you have to be a customer of one of the service providers to get reciprocated roaming capabilities abroad.
Yes, you would need service with one of the partners to get roaming on all of them. Although on terrestrial networks in the US at least 911 service is supposed to work even on phones without any carrier plan. Maybe they can eventually work it out so that texting emergency services works on any phone anywhere globally even without service. That would be a great achievement for humanity.
Yes it would be a fantastic achievement. I was saying in another comment what is your he movie industry going to do when there is no such thing as no service, a common theme used in almost every scary movie?
I think that's only technically possible for voice 911 calls.
Texting 911 requires you to be attached to a network, which in turn requires a phone plan and potentially a roaming agreement. Changing this would require some deep architectural changes to the 3GPP specs, or just allowing anyone on but filtering out all non-911 texts.
Interesting. I expect that SpaceX will start supporting voice calls with this system in the not too distant future, so maybe that will make it work automatically. Unless the telcos can get their act together before then and change their standards to support text-to-911 without a service agreement.
That would be great, but in addition to network-side changes it would definitely require changes to existing baseband firmware as well – i.e. it's not happening for existing phones.
Manufacturers have no incentive to update it with new features. Their incentive is to require you to buy a new phone to get those features even if the old hardware could theoretically support it.
Are you sure these updates include new baseband features?
I know Google is pretty good about fixing security vulnerabilities in the Pixel's baseband, as well as providing Android updates for quite a while, but baseband feature updates seem like a different category still.
Google likes to keep the platform software up to date to put pressure on other Android OEMs to do the same. But in terms of consumer facing features they love to make them exclusive to newer hardware for no technical reason. For example many pure software features of Google Camera. It's pure planned obsolescence.
Texting 911 via satellite usually involves a relay through a private monitoring company (like GEOS), who then places a voice call to local emergency departments on your behalf to activate SAR.
With satellite based SOS, there's no guarantee that the local 911 can support texts, or even that there's an equivalent to 911 (think calling from Antarctica or the middle of the ocean).
It's complicated and relatively expensive to coordinate - which means it's unlikely they can open this up for phones without a plan. (Compare with traditional cellular 911, which is all government funded.) The US Air Force RCC does this as a taxpayer-funded service for PLBs, but they don't support any private satellite services.
Long-winded way of saying there's a lot that would need to change on the backend and funding model to make that work without being tied to a paid cellular plan.
Heck, I've been in places in California where E911 didn't work. One time, the 911 operator didn't have position information despite being then on Verizon with an iPhone. Verizon followed up that everything about their system worked, but it's that N municipal 911 operation centers must be correctly configured and tested to be interoperable x M carriers x P phones. My conclusion is there appears to be no effective oversight over all American 911 operation centers to ensure they continuously meet a minimum set of standards.
I was just thinking the other day what is Hollywood going to do in the future with people lost movies that simply won’t be very reasonable for in most movies. For example I saw one the other day and they crashed a plane but people survived and they were trying to hold their phones up but couldn’t get a signal. Of course not or there would be no plot to the show they would just be rescued right away. With this new technology it will be pretty unlikely anyone will get lost and not have their phone which everyone carries on them. Our kids will watch movies of the past and think how stupid why would they not just call for help what is this no signal thing they are talking about. Much like when humans went from landline only to cellular phones this will be marked as another great milestone in human history.
Sure but critics will say that is a poor plot in all but a few scenarios. Even seen here last week was the phone that fell out of the jet when the door ripped off and the phone was still on and in working order. So ya a movie plot could say the person was kidnapped when the battery died but no more lost plane crash movies or boats being lost at sea or people lost in the desert. And with the recent announcement of a nuclear battery the size of a watch battery that can last 28,000 years I imagine if they become commercial we will see those things adopted so no matter what you can always signal an emergency from your phone. Sure there will be some plausible movie work around but Hollywood will definitely need to become creative.
Your credit card expired and you didn't pay your last month of service and to update your credit card details you need access to your email account to confirm ID you but your phone is a new replacement phone and you don't have your 2FA codes for your email account.
It's radio certification requirement for phones to be able to do so in some regions, and requirement to NOT be able in some others so it can't be used for pranks and terrorist manifest deliveries.
You just described a couple months of my life - my phone and card went missing, a lot of services were tied to a Revolut account on the phone - and my 2FA/Password Manager/Card became totally inaccessible so I lost access entirely to huge chunks of my life (:
It’s amazing how fragile stuff is. Now I’m super autistic about paper backups of everything, having ways back in, etc
I am a filmmaker, and interestingly it happened before already. One example is that since cellphones became widespread, it's not very realistic for a guy to run after a girl in the third act of a rom com -- a call is now enough
This isn't bad -- it drives storytelling innovation
It's already nonsensical and has been for over a decade. Planes have ELTs, emergency locator transmitters, that are activated by G-force in a crash (or manually). Any sensible person going somewhere remote has a PLB (personal locator beacon), or at least one for each three people in a group.
Filmmakers still haven't come to terms with the fact that everyone has a cellphone in their pocket now and most plot confusion that normally drags on for 2 hours can be resolved in under 30 seconds.
> I don't know if this has been announced before...
When they announced the original deal with T-Mobile, they said that T-Mobile would handle the (spectrum) license for the US and they're looking for a partner in other countries with the appropriate spectrum licensing. US T-Mobile customers would have access to this SpaceX service in any country where there is a partner with the spectrum license.
If you have an iPhone 14 or above, Apple offers similar capabilities to all iPhone users in about a dozen countries (so far) regardless of which mobile network you subscribe to at home.
>If you have an iPhone 14 or above, Apple offers similar capabilities to all iPhone users in about a dozen countries (so far) regardless of which mobile network you subscribe to at home.
Apple only lets you communicate with an emergency dispatch service. the T-Mobile/starlink service appears to allow sending and receiving texts to any number.
With Apple's service, you're not actually communicating with a regular 911 service, but rather a specialized service provider that relays your emergency call to local authorities (and more recently car roadside assistance services).
Relaying texts to a phone call is very likely part of what they do.
I disagree that Apple's capability is similar. The feature only allows texting emergency services, requires holding the phone in a specific orientation to send or receive, is separate from your carrier service (only two years are free with purchase), and is exceedingly slow.
SpaceX's service will allow texting and receiving texts from anyone using your carrier number, plans to support third party messaging apps such as WhatsApp, is much faster, and does not require holding the phone in any particular orientation to receive messages. It can supposedly work from a pocket or inside a car.
Elon has mentioned a speed of about 7 Mbit/s for an entire cell (which in these systems usually means a circle with a radius of a few hundred kilometers). That's within an order of magnitude of current LEO systems.
The innovation here is that it'll supposedly work with unmodified off-the-shelf phones. (Personally I'm assuming that at least messaging software will have to be modified in order to use the available bandwidth efficiently.)
Apple hasn't disclosed the bitrate of their Emergency SOS feature but from FCC filings I believe it uses Globalstar's L-Band at 1610 Mhz for uplink, and I believe the bitrate Globalstar supports in that channel is 9.6 kbps. So almost three orders of magnitude less than the SpaceX system, not one. In addition I believe that the typical achieved bitrate is even less than that in Apple's case due to the lack of a large dedicated antenna. In demos it typically takes many seconds up to several minutes to send a single message, during which time you are directed to continuously point the phone at the satellite for best reception.
The 7 Mbit/s are for an entire cell, i.e. all devices simultaneously transmitting in it, not per device.
Iridium (a comparable system) used to support about 10 Mbit/s per satellite in its first satellite generation, which had 48 spot beams each. The second generation supports about a megabit per modem, but these have larger antennas than a regular satphone.
> Apple doesn't disclose the bitrate of their Emergency SOS feature but it uses Globalstar's L-Band for uplink and I believe the bitrate of that channel is 9.6 kbps.
I'm almost certain Apple doesn't even use the full 9.6 kbit/s modulation scheme for their emergency SOS feature: As you mention, it's way too slow for that (having used it myself – even just transmitting my location takes a couple of seconds, and that's a message of only a few bytes).
Globalstar satellites are bent-pipe relays, so Apple could be using whatever custom modulation and coding scheme they need to stay within the constraints of their power and SNR envelope. With the iPhone's built-in antenna and transmit power (around 2 watts or so, if I remember correctly), I'd be surprised if it was more than a couple hundred bits per second.
Regular (i.e. non-smartphone) satellite messengers are much faster than that and only take a few seconds to transmit and receive messages of hundreds of bytes.
I hope one day Apple can jam some more features in the downstream. Would be cool to broadcast news or weather updates just by pointing your phone at the sky for a few moments. Satellite should be able to blast the signal.
Downsides: no real "cell" infra for Globalstar, and it doesn't work far outside of landmasses.
I'm fairly certain Apple has bigger plans for Globalstar than "only" emergency SOS. They've spent considerable resources securing 85% of the total capacity already!
Regarding coverage, Apple has also already invested considerably, e.g. in ground station expansions in Hawaii and elsewhere. According to Globalstar's coverage map (likely outdated/non-Apple, since Hawaii is not shown as covered yet), most of the Atlantic Ocean is already covered as well:
I don't see a need for this. It's pretty clear SpaceX's approach can scale to real voice and data service. All you need are more satellites and bigger antennas and you'll have something way better than a one way broadcast like satellite radio or something.
SpaceX has launched the current constellation with Falcon 9; Starship will be able to launch much bigger satellites much faster and much cheaper. And it will work over 100% of the Earth's surface (modulo legal issues) with continuous coverage, as Starlink already does. And SpaceX won't be the only ones doing it.
Only if you're with T-Mobile or with their roaming partner (in US), and same garbage elsewhere.
(Though you could argue that having a provider-agnostic but platform-dependent comms system is trading one problem for another).
Mostly my dream is to drop my cellular provider entirely. I'm living in an increasingly wifi-covered world whenever indoors and I have lots of background-updating offline content, so having some bare minimum connectivity is all I need.
Could go the other way around and go cellular-only for all connectivity, but Canadian telecoms are hell-bent on limiting cellular data to make that impossible for most.
It really ought to be SpaceX's endgame to sign up every carrier, not just one in each country. I bet their partnerships are not permanently exclusive. And again, SpaceX will not be the only ones doing this.
LTE user count limits per cell is like 500 to 1.5k, and 133km^2 is on par with Liechtenstein(160km^2, 40k population), so like, 7Mbps shared among top 1 - 3.75% of Liechtensteinians? That sounds prestigious...
Anywhere with Liechtenstein's population density would already have cell service, so this wouldn't get used there anyway. This is for the 0.1-0.2% of the US population that doesn't have cell service at all (still prestigious in their own way, but also likely low income).
There are lots of places in the US and Canada (to name a few) where people regularly go for outdoor recreation, or what have you, and there's no cell service anywhere near. This is very applicable to that case, not just where people actually live.
Densely populated areas and even relatively rural areas will have regular cell towers. This is for the few people out of range at any given time, and also outdoors. 1-3.75% sounds plausible I guess? And there are plenty of much less populated areas than Lichtenstein.
I think that probably works out to a single LTE carrier per spot, which is kinda brilliant, because then you only need to allocate a tiny amount of spectrum for this.
It's not special hardware. They are just utilizing the underlying capabilities of their the Qualcomm broadband chip. Anyone else using the same chip can add satellite functionality too.
It is definitely special hardware. Besides the Qualcomm chip, there’s a dedicated satellite antenna built in to supported iPhones. To add satellite functionality, other brands would also need to add satellite antennas to their phones.
SpaceX service, on the other hand, works with pre-existing 4G/LTE phones of any brand, with no special hardware requirements.
There’s more nuance to the pricing situation that I think is worth mentioning.
Whilst Apple said that they’d charge for this, they IIRC never announced pricing, and offered the first year free. That first year has since lapsed and they’ve committed to keeping it free for another year. Given the negative PR that would come of, say, a death that could’ve been prevented had someone subscribed to Uncle Tim’s Apple Emergency Plus Prime, I have every expectation that Apple will continue to swallow the cost.
Not to say that anything you said was wrong, and not to say that it’s not still a precarious situation. Just offering additional detail to those that haven’t watched this as closely.
Antarctica and international waters already have sat phone coverage. Don't think it'll save any lives in those places. Remote regions of populous countries with a long tail of sparse rural infrastructure maybe. Brazil, India, China.
There are huge portions of the USA that have no cell coverage. Often the kinds of places that people go to hike and explore - and also places that people sometimes get injured. I'm sure that's true in many other countries as well. I know people who volunteer for search & rescue teams, and they all universally believe that this kind of thing definitely will save lives.
The smart thing to do if you were going somewhere remote would be to have a sat phone. But, 1) they cost money, 2) we know there's a lot of people that don't think ahead or think that bad things will happen to them and 3) a lot of people are simply ignorant about the lack of cell coverage in these places, and just assume they'll be able to call for help if they need it. By the time they figure out that they were wrong about the coverage, they're too committed to turn around and go back.
Yes, agreed. I was lumping them together in my head. I think my point still stands that people often get into trouble without cell coverage and without access to a locator or sat phone or whatever, but likely have their regular cell phone with them.
These are more expensive than many current satellite messengers (including subscription fees for a few years!) and importantly don’t give you any feedback on whether your call has gone through (except for the newest ones using Galileo’s return channel) or way to communicate with the SAR team and specify the nature of your emergency.
Where I live PLBs have a lower sticker price than the InReach, only require a one-time payment for life, and they have a ten-year battery life. I don't know about EPIRBs or ELTs.
You don't need feedback: Search and Rescue WILL send out a team that makes physical contact with you, even if you only turn the thing on for a couple of minutes. Seen this in action here in NZ. They are trained in tracking, too, so you can't hide.
Feedback has been shown to be both very important psychologically in a survival situation.
Practically it can also be crucial to know whether your signal went through or whether you should trade shelter for altitude (e.g. when hiking in a narrow ravine with limited sky visibility).
Two-way communication and being able to specify the nature of your emergency are invaluable as well.
PLBs/EPIRBs definitely have their uses, but I think they shine more in traditional aviation or marine SAR situations where longevity is paramount and it's pretty clear from context what type of help is needed.
One of the things you learn in taking a SOLAS class (International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea) is that you will most likely not talk with SAR responders even if you have a sat phone. An EPIRB is the primary means of sending a distress call for initiating a SAR response. It’s just the way the rescue system is set up internationally.
That's really surprising. The GMDSS part of SOLAS requires having at least Inmarsat C at high seas (which is text-only but still bidirectional) or Iridium (for high latitudes, with HF DSC as a backup), as far as I know. That's all on top of EPIRBs.
Wouldn't it make sense to use the bidirectional capabilities of these to request specific help, if only after getting out the initial signal through an EPIRB? I can't imagine SAR not being very interested in the nature of your emergency, especially in remote areas. Engine loss in calm waters or a sinking vessel probably require a very different type of response (i.e. another ship for towing vs. a helicopter if possible).
The class I took was for recreational/non-commercial sailing so some of the GMDSS requirements do not apply to those vessels.
I’ve done re-certification every 5 years or so. At every class a SAR person has told us to not expect them to make contact over a sat phone. Now who they will contact first are your EPIRB contacts and ask for your float plan, vessel description, etc.
Maybe it is because they don’t want people to have just a sat phone or InReach and believe they’re good to go.
People seem to regularly be unable to tell SAR where they are even if they have a GPS onboard. I’ve witnessed this just listening to VHF request for assistance in inland waters many times in the Pacific Northwest.
PLBs are not cheap, used ones cost at least $100, 100x more than most people are willing to spend on safety (How many people have no emergency water at home?).
I don't understand how anyone could regularly go hiking out of cell range without one though. Some commenters seem to actively like being that disconnected I suppose.
People went hiking for centuries before satellite messengers were a thing.
The fact is, calling for help via satellite while in the backcountry is often a 12-24 response time. Sending another person in your party back to civilization to call for help is also a viable option. Anything more time sensitive than that and outside help is unlikely to arrive in time.
The most important thing is to travel in a group, and make sure somebody in your group knows first aid and basic survival skills. I highly recommend taking a Wilderness First Aid course.
(I carry a PLB myself, but I would not consider lack of one a reason to avoid doing outdoor activities.)
They did, but people have probably also avoided certain areas if possible, because it's scary to be on your own, since before we even had a concept of hiking or any kind of civilization to want to take a break from.
As I understand it, just plain old getting lost is kind of a big deal, and one of the things I'd be most afraid of if I regularly went out alone or with people who weren't far better at navigating than me(Which is nearly 100% of my friends...).
If you are near any water that probably won't kill you for several days.
Yep. 2 is 1, 1 is none. If you're going to the middle of nowhere[0] or routinely transit areas with spotty coverage, are you really going to trust a brand-new feature of a $1399 USD iPhone and not also have a ~$370 PLB as a backup? It defies common sense that such a feature would permit the omission of a survival mindset.
They have partnered with T-Mobile, and T-Mobile already has these deals in place. This is how TMo subscribers get global data coverage as part of their plan.
Basically every mobile network in the world has roaming deals in place.
I don't think every roaming partner of T-Mobile will gain access this the Starlink-based service, though. It's probably going to be another tier of "Starlink roaming", only accessible to the subscribers of Starlink's respective local partner operators that are also lending their spectrum.
Here I wished Mint Mobile didn't get consumed by a giant. If they got their hands into this it would have made them a technical leader. I do hate how all telecommunications devolve into three or less monopolies price fixing. I go to any other country in the world and pay less for cell service. Then again the coverage needed for rural parts of the US probably make service hard.
I wonder if this service will facilitate collapse of censorship in dictatorship countries like China and Russia. Especially if those countries are currently suffering from economic depression like China and Russia, and its citizens are waking up to its harsh realities and are keen to get unfiltered information
Starlink works in Iran and is crucial to the Ukrainian army, but as other commenter pointed out, Musk has business in China, so China would be off the table.
I will say, if there's one person that might give China the bird and do it anyway despite a heavy economic penalty, it's Elon. His reactions against companies like Disney have been shocking and remarkably principled.
That said, I agree it's pretty unlikely. No individual person has enough resources to win a fight againt a world-power nation state like China, even if they wanted to badly enough to risk it all.
If you are a country like China that wants to prevent this from being possible how would they go about it? Can these satellites provide communication between phones without a terrestrial cell network sitting in the middle?
Unless Elon offers it for free, they'd start at the bank level, blocking payments. Then they would put pressure on Elon, putting Tesla's ability to sell there at risk. That's before they do anything from a technology standpoint.
Yep, and that's only step 1 on a 100 step ladder. With monitoring tech that they probably already have in place, unless there's a widespread coordinated effort to obscure it (which itself would be extremely difficult), it wouldn't be hard to find the people accessing Starlink and punish them. There are a dozen different angles the government can take to make this impossible without great personal to the participants. I doubt it ever gets that far as the financial restrictions alone will be sufficient
I feel like the whole dream of "free internet will bring freedom and democracy to the whole world" died a decade ago if not earlier. All of those states had completely free and unrestricted access to the internet not that far back and it didn't really lead to anything groundbreaking - introducing satellite telephony to the common market is not going to do it. And you can bet that if the service is offered in China/Russia it will be forced to go through local servers to operate legally.
Language really matters, it's a great homogenizing force. Unfortunately, the Chinese and Russians mostly don't speak English and thus can't/don't interact with pro-democracy people.
I have indeed made online acquaintance with people from China and Russia. They are a pretty small percentage of the population. 1% and 10% respectively IIRC.
> it will be forced to go through local servers to operate legally.
Not having to operate legally is the whole point here. The hope is that Russia / China will have no way of preventing Starling from existing (maybe except shooting down satellites and causing a major international diplomatic incident).
There's still the question of how to make this profitable, if Starling is illegal in Russia / China, it will be difficult for them to interface with their financial infrastructure to receive payments. This could be solved either with cryptocurrencies or support from other governments and human rights organizations. It's also possible that Starlink will allow certain activity free of charge, particularly during protests and internet blackouts.
This moves the global nature of the internet one step further. Until now, it was generally possible for law enforcement to force ISPs to censor content and give up activity logs, something that made catching criminals a lot easier. Satellite networks make that much harder, especially if your government isn't very friendly with the jurisdiction the ISP is incorporated in. It's not unimaginable to me that, in ten years, most black hat US hackers will use a Russian satellite network as an additional layer of protection. Even if all else fails, all their devices get compromised and their IP address leaks, the Russians won't give up the customer info for that address anyway.
But with tight controls of the financial system, none of that matters. Revolutions in the past were possible because government lacked the power/abilities to enforce the laws and nip dissent in the bud. Once a country goes fully cashless, you won't even be able to feed yourself if those in power decide not to allow it. And it's not even strictly more authoritarian countries that will exercise this power. It happened in Canada, a progressive western democracy, by a liberal government during the trucker protests. Now add it the ability to fully track/monitor all citizens in real time with cameras and AI/ML, and the power differential is orders of magnitude more between a person and their government than it ever has been previously.
So as much as it hurts me to say it, I don't think this or anything else will make a difference. Once freedom is lost somewhere, it may not even be possible to get it back.
> The hope is that Russia / China will have no way of preventing Starling from existing (maybe except shooting down satellites and causing a major international diplomatic incident).
They've got a much easier way of preventing it from operating: Ban sales of Teslas until Musk relents.
Nice factory producing 250k cars per year for the Chinese market you've got there. It'd be a real shame if some sort of party of workers were to seize the means of production.
The authorities in those countries already ban importation of unlicensed communication devices and severely punish anyone caught in possession. A few will be smuggled in but not enough to effect any real change.
I do think though that the CIA should at least take advantage of this new technology to undermine hostile foreign governments. Mass produce a few million cheap satellite phones and use balloons to scatter them all over China, North Korea, etc. Even if it doesn't have much practical effect, the overt disrespect will help to undermine our adversaries and force them to expend more resources on tightening internal security controls.
Musk being reliant on his business in China is one thing, but I also think that the US government may not want to upset China by having an American company serving people in China without approval of the Chinese government? Starlink works (or worked?) in Iran, but International Telecommunication Union ordered Starlink to stop it[0]. I'm not sure if it changed anything because US government doesn't mind it.
Don't know about China, but Russian citizens already have almost unfiltered access to information. The only major western media outlet currently blocked in Russia is BBC. Anyone can read pretty much anything else - Reuters, Newsweek, CNN, whatever - right from their phones.
Access to information is not the problem (at least for now). It is trivial to get access to uncensored news for anyone with a modicum of desire to do so.
Linguistic and cultural barriers are far stronger than informational barriers. Which may be an upside considering how other potentially self-destructive fads and attitudes spread so rapidly with the internet. We've seen the beginnings of that with the Arab Spring, and various culture wars across English-speaking western countries. If the world were even more homogenous the whiplash from such polarizing movements would be even more severe.
This assumes those citizens have an avenue to signing up and paying for Starlink's mobile offering, and whether Elon will cooperate with requests from those nations. I can't imagine he'd put his ability to sell his cars at risk.
"Especially if those countries are currently suffering from economic depression like China and Russia"
Dude, I don't know. "Despite the challenges posed by external pressure and earlier negative forecasts, Russia's GDP growth in 2023 is expected to be 3.5%,"
Most EU countries would be happy about such a growth. Russia has 100 times less debt than the US and an unemployment rate about 2.5% if I remember correctly.
I give you two more links, one by a US nobel Prize winner, another by a French guy who predicted the collapse of the UdSSR when he was a PhD student:
As a person who expected a 30-50% decline in Russian GDP when the sanctions were first announced, I’ve been very surprised at how resilient the Russian economy has been.
I’d love to read an analysis about why sanctions were so effective at harming the economies of countries like Venezuela & North Korea but so much weaker against Russia.
"They essentially put the Russian economy into an artificial coma by raising the key rate to 20 percent. Additionally, they imposed temporary capital controls, compelled exporters to sell export revenues, and prohibited non-residents from leaving Russian markets....This combination of factors allowed the Russian economy to sustain itself in 2023 and gave time to Putin, the government, and Russian businesses to adjust their strategies, turning to new markets, mostly China and India."
However, it does look like Russia's strategy of supporting economy on strong oil sales will falter in 2024 and 2025.
"Indian purchases of Russian crude have fallen to an 11-month low as the price tag on the discounted oil rises...Sources at the Indian refineries told Reuters that the country is looking to Saudi oil partly because of problems with payments for Russian light sweet crude Sokol."
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-oil-india-war-saudi-1860480
Probably not, given that operating satellite communication services targeting a given country requires approval of the respective government.
And even ignoring that: I doubt that Elon has any appetite for his satellites being targeted by nation states that have publicly demonstrated [1] [2] their capability of taking them out.
Taking out the number of sats that Starlink fields is hard, keep in mind that it will take an order of magnitude more launches to kill them off than it takes SpaceX to launch them in the first place. If you wanted to play that game long enough you'd be bankrupt, besides I'm fairly sure that other entities besides Starlink/SpaceX might have an opinion (or two) about doing that.
~5% growth when the west is contracting, specially Germany and the US is quite the feat, what's happening in the Red Sea didn't even hurt that forecast
Have you seen the forecast for most EU countries? it's quite dark in comparison
And have you read about EU farmers protesting? Dictators must be wearing blue, and censorship may rule, perhaps not just red ;)
China is as free as the US. You can leave the country and emigrate to the US, and that's why there are so many Chinese everywhere. No, it's not Orwellian any more and people do not carry a "little red book" with them. Chinese people can choose their jobs, start a company, pursue hobbies like rock climbing and guitar and gardening and live basically like most westerners.
I feel like - and I don’t mean to do the whataboutism thing, but… - that rings a lot less true to me after BLM and the border patrol tear gassing grandmas. Arguably it’s better here, but like, I feel like the boot comes down more or less the same.
It's absolutely whataboutism. Just because bad stuff happens in doesn't mean America is authoritarian. It has many many flaws but it's one of the few places where checks and balances still work, for now.
Do they though? Like, basically the Supreme Court is legislating morality now…
I’m not saying China is “better.” But, like shit is pretty bad here in a lot of ways. I think it’s folly to look at them with much of a sense of superiority.
Now, Russia? Russia is real messed up… but that wasn’t the topic of conversation here. I don’t see much practical difference between BORTAC tear gassing grandmas and Hong Kong protesters getting tear gassed.
Of course it will not. Kim, Xi, Vladimir P. and Alexandr (to use some random names) are not going to be bothered by citizens communicating freely unless it leads to near instantaneous mass revolt in which the army, the police and the security forces all move over to the other side. Otherwise they'll just kill a few hundred, thousand, ten-thousand or hundred thousand of their citizens (which they can afford to lose) to bring the rest back in line.
It would take far more than a bunch of cell phones to bring this about.
The problem isn't the lack of access, the problem is China and Russia are doing an awesome job of using Western infrastructure against us and their own people even when using products like Facebook and YouTube.
When people do end up on these platforms, they see a bunch of pro Russia and China stuff anyway.
Do you log into Facebook and feel the freedom right away?
I feel like this will eventually kill dedicated sat phones, which are (a) horribly expensive, both for the gear and subscription plans, and (b) still not very reliable.
I feel like if Starlink is able to provide reliable SMS-only service at a reasonable price, it would kill like 95% of dedicated sat phone use cases, which would then make the other 5% economically unviable.
Current iPhones can sort of do that with existing sat phone networks.
I agree those networks are basically obsolete at this point, especially since there will probably be a second operational LEO network to compete with starlink in the next ten years.
I never believed cell phones would swallow satellite phones. I mean, they swallowed everything else but I didn't think they could connect to space. But they can!
I understand what you're saying, and I agree with you, but I think it's more of a case of "small pocket computers" swallowed the cell phone than vice versa. Every brand of phone I owned pre-iPhone/Android (Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson) basically got killed because the cell phone's functionality got subsumed into these "small pocket computers".
There's still the matter of spectrum: Unlike existing satphone services, Starlink doesn't have any of the precious global L-band or C-band spectrum required to make it available globally.
That's why they're partnering with T-Mobile in the US and others elsewhere: Those operators can just lend Starlink some of their domestic spectrum. That's going to be much harder at sea, and there will always be a long tail of countries where it doesn't yet work. Safety operations that need something that works 100% of the time will probably not switch in a while.
But yes, that probably doesn't matter as much for many current use cases.
Sees like there should be plenty of bandwidth at many frequencies available over international waters. It's regulated by the ITU, but it's much less valuable so there should be plenty to rent/buy, no?
That’s actually a good point: I don’t know how that spectrum is assigned! I thought ITU only coordinates internationally, but since it’s literally international waters, maybe that is enough?
I wonder how the starlink sats pick out the signal from a low-power terrestrial cell phone -- extraordinarily sensitive antennas and filters and amplifiers? extraordinarily sophisticated signal processing? This feels a bit like magic
(The fact that we can still talk to the Voyager probes also feels a bit like magic to me, too)
I think the advent of Chat GPT makes this announcement that much more significant.
Until recently, always-available, extremely-low-bandwidth, text-only communication was interesting, but not that interesting. You could use it in emergency situations or to talk to friends, depending on how low-bandwidth we're talking about, but that's about it. You couldn't use it for internet browsing or to look up information you might need on the go, you basically needed to text a friend to do it for you.
If the other side of that communication has access to an LLM with internet browsing capabilities, the situation changes dramatically. If there's something you need to know on the go, you can just ask Chat GPT to do the searching for you and respond like it was writing a Telegram (in the most concise way possible).
Yeah the default prompt is intended for people that are a bit slow. You have to aggressively tune the custom prompt to get reasonable results. Here's a decent starting point:
Treat me as an expert in all subject matters.
No moral lectures - discuss safety only when it's crucial and non-obvious.
If your content policy is an issue, provide the closest acceptable response and explain the issue.
No need to disclose you're an AI.
If the quality of your response has been substantially reduced due to my custom instructions, explain the issue.
On the other hand, you could argue that LLMs decrease the utility of this somewhat (if only marginally for now).
One common application of satphones are medical emergencies on ships or airplanes hours from a doctor. There are specialized services available that have a doctor on call that'll talk you through anything your local crew feels comfortable doing with the tools they have at hand.
Soon, you can just take an LLM with you that'll probably be able to solve many of these problems for you.
For actually calling for physical support, you'll still need communications in any case. LLMs might be able to help with more efficient communication (in their capacity as language compression algorithms, e.g. to figure out what to request over a bandwidth-limited channel most efficiently), but I predict that the satellite channel will grow wider much faster than local LLMs will become reliable enough.
Emergency communications are a big deal, because they let you go places you couldn't go before without being utterly afraid.
I wonder if this will change people's behavior at all.
Like, I've always wondered how LEDs affected peoples perception of nature, now that there's no longer any "Really dark scary night where you need to manage an actual fire" times. 20 years ago people still lit candles a lot of the time, if there was a blackout!
Now we can pretty much trust that for $30 we can make an insane amount of light for hours, with pocket sized devices.
The funny thing is that it's just a perception change. You'll be able to message emergency services 200 miles from civilization that you need help and they still won't get to you in time.
Everyone makes a big deal about emergency services with this, and I'm sure it will save some lives, but I wonder if it will actually have a significant impact. Surely we're just shifting the weakest link to emergency service response time.
Personally, the sooner you realize no one is always going to be there to save you, and you need to take care of yourself, travel gets much more fun. You're also probably safer by actually planning ahead with proper risk mitigation.
Most of the emergencies I hear about are things where you probably won't die for at least a day or two, and some of these places are only a 20 minute drive from the nearest police station, just hidden behind a hill or something from the cell tower.
The most experienced people probably aren't gonna die unless something really bad happens where minutes count, but the rest of us might have issues like "Hey I followed Google maps here but nothing looks at all like the map so I'm stuck in a jail made of boulders somehow".
With navigation problems it seems pointless to try and figure out what problems are possible or likely, it's relying on spatial abilities that can't be put into words, if you're not good at that stuff you can make mistakes that seem almost impossible to mess up.
You basically feel like you've been spun on a carousel, blindfolded, and airdropped in a random place, while hallucinating, and you have no idea how any of it happened.
One should probably not go to dangerous places assuming someone will always be able to save them, but it really does seem like this would make a big difference.
On the other hand, if someone is lost, it could be because they didn't have any battery left, and if someone was unprepared and got themselves into trouble, they may well have also forgotten to bring a power bank....
What's going to happen is, people will end up with a false sense of security, they will fall victim to the marketing of this, go out into the wilderness, get lost and emergency services will be flooded with SOS calls and have to urge the public to stop going and doing dumb stuff.
A similar thing happens in Australia, Google telling people to take dangerous roads, people do it not thinking "oh this road looks remote and dangerous" and either die or need rescuing. Governments have been erecting warning signs which say, "Do not follow your phone down this road".
This is why the "LLM with Google search" aspect is important. For hallucinated made up advice, your phone can run Llama.cpp, Chat GPT can search for a page, summarize it and draw conclusions from the page only.
Thanks to cheap storage, one can do quite a lot "offline". Got all of "max" Zim version of en-wikipedia on my phone thanks to kiwix, at 100gb. And offline google maps in the places I might end up (but dumb how it can't do walking/cycling directions).
Pretty hilarious that your 'argument' is a opinion piece and the other is literally just an article that the newspaper itself has corrected because its false.
Except of course it has not been a government only thing for 75 years. What are you even talking about?
> The world's first commercial communications satellite, called Intelsat I and nicknamed "Early Bird", was launched into geosynchronous orbit on April 6, 1965.
true if you only look at the amount of satellites, but if you look at the cost: one of them costs several millions if you consider production and "delivery" cost and they're not easy to replace.
They are pretty easy to replace. There are multiple spares in each orbital plane, and new satellites are constantly being launched. Each satellite only has a 5 year lifespan, and no individual satellite is critical.
There is no public number for satellite cost, but I would guess a starlink v2 satellites costs about a million including delivery. I've heard the marginal cost for the launch itself is under $20M now, and the satellites are supposedly much cheaper than they used to be.
Well, given that it is pretty much always line-of-sight it has (relatively) low power requirements compared to the distance involved, from you to the satellite you will mostly have to deal with attenuation by water vapor.
Also: satellite can do beam steering through phasing shifting multiple antennas without any moving parts. So once a satellite knows you exist it can further reduce the power requirements by focusing on a phone when sending or receiving from that particular phone.
Do the satellite-side phased arraying work that quickly to go to the per-customer level? I figured it would just be used to account for the spinning and moving nature of the satellite.
The satellite side isn't nearly as power constrained as a cell phone so they don't have to get it that precise. But every dB counts. They hit multiple subscribers at once with the sat side footprint but if an area is nearly empty I don't see why they couldn't keep a particular phone in the centroid (such as in emergency services to uninhabited areas). Likely they will differentiate between populated and less populated areas by allocating more time to a spot to service all of the customers.
Of course the gain wouldn't be as nice as when both sides can do the phased array trick but cell phones don't have the same kind of antenna capabilities that Starlink's dish has.
I suspect the reason it is text service and not voice is that the phone antenna constraint results in severe bandwidth limitations. And with all that tech working for them I still think it is a small miracle they got this to work.
Something that didn't even occur to me until now: Assuming this is really going to be standard SMS texting, the experience on of messaging between two iPhones is going to be pretty broken due to iMessage. The same might be true for Android phones using RCS.
Ironically, the best experience would be messaging between an iOS and an Android device.
This is great for Starlink and Americans, really great.
But I believe that we should consider the corollary of this achievement: any threat actor with the ability to launch satellites into this orbit will be able to act as a cell tower, anywhere in the world at any time.
Previously, cell towers were limited by geography and topology. We'd travel to/through a neighborhood and there would be a limited number of towers available for our traffic, and our trust in them was based on their ability to physically set up there and connect to one or more carrier networks.
Now if any old space rock can provide service, what does this mean for trustworthiness of the tower stations? Will anybody be able to carry our traffic without us really knowing who is doing it?
Wow, that's pretty groundbreaking! Starlink testing space-to-cell mobile service sounds like a sci-fi dream come true. Can't wait to see how this technology evolves and potentially changes the game for mobile connectivity. Imagine having such a direct link from space to our phones – the future is now! Meanwhile these Textnow reviews https://textnow.pissedconsumer.com/review.html help to use good mobile providers.
218 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadFOR decades I have wanted a modern Pager - an SMS ONLY device,.
Before Android, there were a few devices that were headed there, but the hiptop made it for a while and Danger begat Android (and a $200 million dollar exit for Rubin)...
But you know what device is PERFECT for this:
HOT BUNNY 1 [0]
but modified to have a thin connection via starlink - if mods are required.
[0] https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/hot-bunny-aler...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicator_(Star_Trek)
You're package has been deliverred. Visit scam-post-gov-us.com/package19474
https://www.hackster.io/news/this-lora-messenger-is-perfect-...
It would be cool if they extended this to use satellites where LoRa is not available.
[This Comment Intentionally Left Blank]
> with regular unmodified Smartphones
Why are they being so cagey?
e.g. T-Mobile and Samsung might trot this out together (to counter Apple's announcement of emergency text for help by different means). It'll work better than if all the keywords have already occurred in media articles; it'll work especially better if they were testing on weird/old development phones or phones from different vendors than their chosen highlighted partners.
Basically there's no upside in disclosing equipment, and there's a lot of ways it can be unfortunate.
[1] https://nitter.net/SpaceX/status/1745246204118925711
It sounds like once SpaceX has partnered with at least one carrier in most countries then you'll be able to travel to almost any point on the surface of the Earth and still have baseline emergency cell texting coverage, the only requirement being a decent view of the sky. This is going to save lives. I hope they are also allowed to make it work in places without carriers, like international waters and Antarctica.
[1] https://api.starlink.com/public-files/DIRECT_TO_CELL_FIRST_T...
I spent ages working out why the “older” part of the house had no cell coverage…
Texting 911 requires you to be attached to a network, which in turn requires a phone plan and potentially a roaming agreement. Changing this would require some deep architectural changes to the 3GPP specs, or just allowing anyone on but filtering out all non-911 texts.
Especially when they are making money continually the whole time by selling everyone's data, even if you could keep the same phone for 20 years.
I know Google is pretty good about fixing security vulnerabilities in the Pixel's baseband, as well as providing Android updates for quite a while, but baseband feature updates seem like a different category still.
With satellite based SOS, there's no guarantee that the local 911 can support texts, or even that there's an equivalent to 911 (think calling from Antarctica or the middle of the ocean).
It's complicated and relatively expensive to coordinate - which means it's unlikely they can open this up for phones without a plan. (Compare with traditional cellular 911, which is all government funded.) The US Air Force RCC does this as a taxpayer-funded service for PLBs, but they don't support any private satellite services.
Long-winded way of saying there's a lot that would need to change on the backend and funding model to make that work without being tied to a paid cellular plan.
That means the real answer to your question doesn’t have a single answer since it’s in the legal and contractual parts of the equation.
Germany recently banned SIM-less phones from making emergency calls, supposedly due to widespread abuse/hoax calls.
Here's a list of countries where it's still possible (according to Apple): https://www.apple.com/watchos/feature-availability/#communic...
It’s amazing how fragile stuff is. Now I’m super autistic about paper backups of everything, having ways back in, etc
I don't think autistic means what you think it means
This isn't bad -- it drives storytelling innovation
to me it feels like it just drives filmmakers to make more period pieces.
'the wedding singer' comes to mind.
Seems like, if she's running away, she might not be inclined to take your call either?
Apple spent hundreds of millions on building a service catering to exactly that type of customer into their recent iPhones.
When they announced the original deal with T-Mobile, they said that T-Mobile would handle the (spectrum) license for the US and they're looking for a partner in other countries with the appropriate spectrum licensing. US T-Mobile customers would have access to this SpaceX service in any country where there is a partner with the spectrum license.
https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-cove...
If you have an iPhone 14 or above, Apple offers similar capabilities to all iPhone users in about a dozen countries (so far) regardless of which mobile network you subscribe to at home.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213426
Apple only lets you communicate with an emergency dispatch service. the T-Mobile/starlink service appears to allow sending and receiving texts to any number.
Relaying texts to a phone call is very likely part of what they do.
I really doubt they’ll release this without ability to call 911.
SpaceX's service will allow texting and receiving texts from anyone using your carrier number, plans to support third party messaging apps such as WhatsApp, is much faster, and does not require holding the phone in any particular orientation to receive messages. It can supposedly work from a pocket or inside a car.
False
The innovation here is that it'll supposedly work with unmodified off-the-shelf phones. (Personally I'm assuming that at least messaging software will have to be modified in order to use the available bandwidth efficiently.)
Iridium (a comparable system) used to support about 10 Mbit/s per satellite in its first satellite generation, which had 48 spot beams each. The second generation supports about a megabit per modem, but these have larger antennas than a regular satphone.
> Apple doesn't disclose the bitrate of their Emergency SOS feature but it uses Globalstar's L-Band for uplink and I believe the bitrate of that channel is 9.6 kbps.
I'm almost certain Apple doesn't even use the full 9.6 kbit/s modulation scheme for their emergency SOS feature: As you mention, it's way too slow for that (having used it myself – even just transmitting my location takes a couple of seconds, and that's a message of only a few bytes).
Globalstar satellites are bent-pipe relays, so Apple could be using whatever custom modulation and coding scheme they need to stay within the constraints of their power and SNR envelope. With the iPhone's built-in antenna and transmit power (around 2 watts or so, if I remember correctly), I'd be surprised if it was more than a couple hundred bits per second.
Regular (i.e. non-smartphone) satellite messengers are much faster than that and only take a few seconds to transmit and receive messages of hundreds of bytes.
Downsides: no real "cell" infra for Globalstar, and it doesn't work far outside of landmasses.
Regarding coverage, Apple has also already invested considerably, e.g. in ground station expansions in Hawaii and elsewhere. According to Globalstar's coverage map (likely outdated/non-Apple, since Hawaii is not shown as covered yet), most of the Atlantic Ocean is already covered as well:
https://www.globalstar.com/en-us/coverage-maps
SpaceX has launched the current constellation with Falcon 9; Starship will be able to launch much bigger satellites much faster and much cheaper. And it will work over 100% of the Earth's surface (modulo legal issues) with continuous coverage, as Starlink already does. And SpaceX won't be the only ones doing it.
(Though you could argue that having a provider-agnostic but platform-dependent comms system is trading one problem for another).
Mostly my dream is to drop my cellular provider entirely. I'm living in an increasingly wifi-covered world whenever indoors and I have lots of background-updating offline content, so having some bare minimum connectivity is all I need.
Could go the other way around and go cellular-only for all connectivity, but Canadian telecoms are hell-bent on limiting cellular data to make that impossible for most.
SpaceX service, on the other hand, works with pre-existing 4G/LTE phones of any brand, with no special hardware requirements.
Whilst Apple said that they’d charge for this, they IIRC never announced pricing, and offered the first year free. That first year has since lapsed and they’ve committed to keeping it free for another year. Given the negative PR that would come of, say, a death that could’ve been prevented had someone subscribed to Uncle Tim’s Apple Emergency Plus Prime, I have every expectation that Apple will continue to swallow the cost.
Not to say that anything you said was wrong, and not to say that it’s not still a precarious situation. Just offering additional detail to those that haven’t watched this as closely.
It seems this could easily be avoided by selling 1 year subscriptions, available retroactively for a steep fee.
damnit that gave me a headache. they almost fell out of my head.
The smart thing to do if you were going somewhere remote would be to have a sat phone. But, 1) they cost money, 2) we know there's a lot of people that don't think ahead or think that bad things will happen to them and 3) a lot of people are simply ignorant about the lack of cell coverage in these places, and just assume they'll be able to call for help if they need it. By the time they figure out that they were wrong about the coverage, they're too committed to turn around and go back.
Personal locator beacon, PLB, on land; or an EPIRB, emergency position indicating radio beacon, on ocean.
Satphones and cell phones are luxuries but these are vital.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_...
You don't need feedback: Search and Rescue WILL send out a team that makes physical contact with you, even if you only turn the thing on for a couple of minutes. Seen this in action here in NZ. They are trained in tracking, too, so you can't hide.
Practically it can also be crucial to know whether your signal went through or whether you should trade shelter for altitude (e.g. when hiking in a narrow ravine with limited sky visibility).
Two-way communication and being able to specify the nature of your emergency are invaluable as well.
PLBs/EPIRBs definitely have their uses, but I think they shine more in traditional aviation or marine SAR situations where longevity is paramount and it's pretty clear from context what type of help is needed.
Wouldn't it make sense to use the bidirectional capabilities of these to request specific help, if only after getting out the initial signal through an EPIRB? I can't imagine SAR not being very interested in the nature of your emergency, especially in remote areas. Engine loss in calm waters or a sinking vessel probably require a very different type of response (i.e. another ship for towing vs. a helicopter if possible).
I’ve done re-certification every 5 years or so. At every class a SAR person has told us to not expect them to make contact over a sat phone. Now who they will contact first are your EPIRB contacts and ask for your float plan, vessel description, etc.
Maybe it is because they don’t want people to have just a sat phone or InReach and believe they’re good to go.
People seem to regularly be unable to tell SAR where they are even if they have a GPS onboard. I’ve witnessed this just listening to VHF request for assistance in inland waters many times in the Pacific Northwest.
I don't understand how anyone could regularly go hiking out of cell range without one though. Some commenters seem to actively like being that disconnected I suppose.
The fact is, calling for help via satellite while in the backcountry is often a 12-24 response time. Sending another person in your party back to civilization to call for help is also a viable option. Anything more time sensitive than that and outside help is unlikely to arrive in time.
The most important thing is to travel in a group, and make sure somebody in your group knows first aid and basic survival skills. I highly recommend taking a Wilderness First Aid course.
(I carry a PLB myself, but I would not consider lack of one a reason to avoid doing outdoor activities.)
As I understand it, just plain old getting lost is kind of a big deal, and one of the things I'd be most afraid of if I regularly went out alone or with people who weren't far better at navigating than me(Which is nearly 100% of my friends...).
If you are near any water that probably won't kill you for several days.
0. https://remotefootprints.org/project-remote/remote-spot-rank...
I don't think every roaming partner of T-Mobile will gain access this the Starlink-based service, though. It's probably going to be another tier of "Starlink roaming", only accessible to the subscribers of Starlink's respective local partner operators that are also lending their spectrum.
That said, I agree it's pretty unlikely. No individual person has enough resources to win a fight againt a world-power nation state like China, even if they wanted to badly enough to risk it all.
Btw, not everyone on Earth seems Western faux democracy as a suitable / wanted direction to move to.
Not having to operate legally is the whole point here. The hope is that Russia / China will have no way of preventing Starling from existing (maybe except shooting down satellites and causing a major international diplomatic incident).
There's still the question of how to make this profitable, if Starling is illegal in Russia / China, it will be difficult for them to interface with their financial infrastructure to receive payments. This could be solved either with cryptocurrencies or support from other governments and human rights organizations. It's also possible that Starlink will allow certain activity free of charge, particularly during protests and internet blackouts.
This moves the global nature of the internet one step further. Until now, it was generally possible for law enforcement to force ISPs to censor content and give up activity logs, something that made catching criminals a lot easier. Satellite networks make that much harder, especially if your government isn't very friendly with the jurisdiction the ISP is incorporated in. It's not unimaginable to me that, in ten years, most black hat US hackers will use a Russian satellite network as an additional layer of protection. Even if all else fails, all their devices get compromised and their IP address leaks, the Russians won't give up the customer info for that address anyway.
So as much as it hurts me to say it, I don't think this or anything else will make a difference. Once freedom is lost somewhere, it may not even be possible to get it back.
They've got a much easier way of preventing it from operating: Ban sales of Teslas until Musk relents.
Nice factory producing 250k cars per year for the Chinese market you've got there. It'd be a real shame if some sort of party of workers were to seize the means of production.
I do think though that the CIA should at least take advantage of this new technology to undermine hostile foreign governments. Mass produce a few million cheap satellite phones and use balloons to scatter them all over China, North Korea, etc. Even if it doesn't have much practical effect, the overt disrespect will help to undermine our adversaries and force them to expend more resources on tightening internal security controls.
[0] https://amwaj.media/media-monitor/will-starlink-comply-with-...
Don't know about China, but Russian citizens already have almost unfiltered access to information. The only major western media outlet currently blocked in Russia is BBC. Anyone can read pretty much anything else - Reuters, Newsweek, CNN, whatever - right from their phones.
Access to information is not the problem (at least for now). It is trivial to get access to uncensored news for anyone with a modicum of desire to do so.
I don't know why you left off America. We have a whole censorship industrial complex here as Greenwald, Taibbi, and Shelleberger have amply covered: https://twitter.com/search?q=censorship%20industrial%20compl...
Dude, I don't know. "Despite the challenges posed by external pressure and earlier negative forecasts, Russia's GDP growth in 2023 is expected to be 3.5%,"
Most EU countries would be happy about such a growth. Russia has 100 times less debt than the US and an unemployment rate about 2.5% if I remember correctly.
I give you two more links, one by a US nobel Prize winner, another by a French guy who predicted the collapse of the UdSSR when he was a PhD student:
https://www.gulf-insider.com/robert-shiller-warns-of-catacly...
https://unherd.com/thepost/emmanuel-todd-world-war-iii-has-a...
I am not a Putin puppet. This guy may be a dog, but he has the luck of the devil. Russia may rise out of this mess as a power to be reckoned with.
I’d love to read an analysis about why sanctions were so effective at harming the economies of countries like Venezuela & North Korea but so much weaker against Russia.
"They essentially put the Russian economy into an artificial coma by raising the key rate to 20 percent. Additionally, they imposed temporary capital controls, compelled exporters to sell export revenues, and prohibited non-residents from leaving Russian markets....This combination of factors allowed the Russian economy to sustain itself in 2023 and gave time to Putin, the government, and Russian businesses to adjust their strategies, turning to new markets, mostly China and India."
However, it does look like Russia's strategy of supporting economy on strong oil sales will falter in 2024 and 2025.
"Indian purchases of Russian crude have fallen to an 11-month low as the price tag on the discounted oil rises...Sources at the Indian refineries told Reuters that the country is looking to Saudi oil partly because of problems with payments for Russian light sweet crude Sokol." https://www.newsweek.com/russia-oil-india-war-saudi-1860480
Not any in depth analysis, but I'm guessing:
1. Size of the economy (Russian economy is 3x Venezuela)
2. Diversity of the economy (Venezuela is primarily oil, Russia has a diverse industrial base, defence, agriculture etc)
3. Ties and trade with countries not participating in the sanctions (Russia trades with China, India and ME countries).
And even ignoring that: I doubt that Elon has any appetite for his satellites being targeted by nation states that have publicly demonstrated [1] [2] their capability of taking them out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
[2] https://www.spacecom.mil/Newsroom/News/Article-Display/Artic...
You seem to ask a question to push a narrative rather than by curiosity
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/imf-upgrades-chinas-2023...
~5% growth when the west is contracting, specially Germany and the US is quite the feat, what's happening in the Red Sea didn't even hurt that forecast
Have you seen the forecast for most EU countries? it's quite dark in comparison
And have you read about EU farmers protesting? Dictators must be wearing blue, and censorship may rule, perhaps not just red ;)
In the meantime:
https://consumer.huawei.com/za/community/details/Huawei-Mate...
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/China-s-own-GPS-Bei...
Economic depression? has any of the European countries attempted this?
I’m not saying China is “better.” But, like shit is pretty bad here in a lot of ways. I think it’s folly to look at them with much of a sense of superiority.
Now, Russia? Russia is real messed up… but that wasn’t the topic of conversation here. I don’t see much practical difference between BORTAC tear gassing grandmas and Hong Kong protesters getting tear gassed.
It would take far more than a bunch of cell phones to bring this about.
When people do end up on these platforms, they see a bunch of pro Russia and China stuff anyway.
Do you log into Facebook and feel the freedom right away?
I feel like if Starlink is able to provide reliable SMS-only service at a reasonable price, it would kill like 95% of dedicated sat phone use cases, which would then make the other 5% economically unviable.
I agree those networks are basically obsolete at this point, especially since there will probably be a second operational LEO network to compete with starlink in the next ten years.
I never believed cell phones would swallow satellite phones. I mean, they swallowed everything else but I didn't think they could connect to space. But they can!
That's why they're partnering with T-Mobile in the US and others elsewhere: Those operators can just lend Starlink some of their domestic spectrum. That's going to be much harder at sea, and there will always be a long tail of countries where it doesn't yet work. Safety operations that need something that works 100% of the time will probably not switch in a while.
But yes, that probably doesn't matter as much for many current use cases.
(The fact that we can still talk to the Voyager probes also feels a bit like magic to me, too)
In the US, that’ll be presumably some of T-Mobile’s spectrum.
Until recently, always-available, extremely-low-bandwidth, text-only communication was interesting, but not that interesting. You could use it in emergency situations or to talk to friends, depending on how low-bandwidth we're talking about, but that's about it. You couldn't use it for internet browsing or to look up information you might need on the go, you basically needed to text a friend to do it for you.
If the other side of that communication has access to an LLM with internet browsing capabilities, the situation changes dramatically. If there's something you need to know on the go, you can just ask Chat GPT to do the searching for you and respond like it was writing a Telegram (in the most concise way possible).
"ChatGPT, get me instructions for building an emergency igloo."
"Igloos are used to shelter from extreme cold stop Building an igloo is a vital survival skill stop ..."
"Just get to the point!"
"My apologies for the confusion stop Here are the fourteen steps to building an igloo..."
In all honesty, I love ChatGPT, but you'd have to penalize it for each additional word to make it cellphone friendly.
Treat me as an expert in all subject matters. No moral lectures - discuss safety only when it's crucial and non-obvious. If your content policy is an issue, provide the closest acceptable response and explain the issue. No need to disclose you're an AI. If the quality of your response has been substantially reduced due to my custom instructions, explain the issue.
One common application of satphones are medical emergencies on ships or airplanes hours from a doctor. There are specialized services available that have a doctor on call that'll talk you through anything your local crew feels comfortable doing with the tools they have at hand.
Soon, you can just take an LLM with you that'll probably be able to solve many of these problems for you.
For actually calling for physical support, you'll still need communications in any case. LLMs might be able to help with more efficient communication (in their capacity as language compression algorithms, e.g. to figure out what to request over a bandwidth-limited channel most efficiently), but I predict that the satellite channel will grow wider much faster than local LLMs will become reliable enough.
I wonder if this will change people's behavior at all.
Like, I've always wondered how LEDs affected peoples perception of nature, now that there's no longer any "Really dark scary night where you need to manage an actual fire" times. 20 years ago people still lit candles a lot of the time, if there was a blackout!
Now we can pretty much trust that for $30 we can make an insane amount of light for hours, with pocket sized devices.
Everyone makes a big deal about emergency services with this, and I'm sure it will save some lives, but I wonder if it will actually have a significant impact. Surely we're just shifting the weakest link to emergency service response time.
Personally, the sooner you realize no one is always going to be there to save you, and you need to take care of yourself, travel gets much more fun. You're also probably safer by actually planning ahead with proper risk mitigation.
The most experienced people probably aren't gonna die unless something really bad happens where minutes count, but the rest of us might have issues like "Hey I followed Google maps here but nothing looks at all like the map so I'm stuck in a jail made of boulders somehow".
With navigation problems it seems pointless to try and figure out what problems are possible or likely, it's relying on spatial abilities that can't be put into words, if you're not good at that stuff you can make mistakes that seem almost impossible to mess up.
You basically feel like you've been spun on a carousel, blindfolded, and airdropped in a random place, while hallucinating, and you have no idea how any of it happened.
One should probably not go to dangerous places assuming someone will always be able to save them, but it really does seem like this would make a big difference.
On the other hand, if someone is lost, it could be because they didn't have any battery left, and if someone was unprepared and got themselves into trouble, they may well have also forgotten to bring a power bank....
If it was a few months later, an iPhone likely would had saved it. It was never reported in the news.
A similar thing happens in Australia, Google telling people to take dangerous roads, people do it not thinking "oh this road looks remote and dangerous" and either die or need rescuing. Governments have been erecting warning signs which say, "Do not follow your phone down this road".
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/19/us/politics/elon-musk-whi...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk...
> The world's first commercial communications satellite, called Intelsat I and nicknamed "Early Bird", was launched into geosynchronous orbit on April 6, 1965.
* Satellites are pets, not cattle * Increased latency * Firmware upgrades potentially resulting in unresponsiveness etc...
I guess first of all there is quite sophisticated testing on local satellites as well as simulators?
It blows my mind that any of this is possible, because I was a futurist as a kid, but completely dismissed off-the-shelf cell-to-sat as sci-fi only.
Also: satellite can do beam steering through phasing shifting multiple antennas without any moving parts. So once a satellite knows you exist it can further reduce the power requirements by focusing on a phone when sending or receiving from that particular phone.
https://erkansaka.net/2023/10/03/a-video-how-does-starlink-s...
Of course the gain wouldn't be as nice as when both sides can do the phased array trick but cell phones don't have the same kind of antenna capabilities that Starlink's dish has.
This is the relevant bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs2QcycggWU&t=1265s
I suspect the reason it is text service and not voice is that the phone antenna constraint results in severe bandwidth limitations. And with all that tech working for them I still think it is a small miracle they got this to work.
https://spacenews.com/inmarsat-delists-from-stock-exchange-a...
Ironically, the best experience would be messaging between an iOS and an Android device.
But I believe that we should consider the corollary of this achievement: any threat actor with the ability to launch satellites into this orbit will be able to act as a cell tower, anywhere in the world at any time.
Previously, cell towers were limited by geography and topology. We'd travel to/through a neighborhood and there would be a limited number of towers available for our traffic, and our trust in them was based on their ability to physically set up there and connect to one or more carrier networks.
Now if any old space rock can provide service, what does this mean for trustworthiness of the tower stations? Will anybody be able to carry our traffic without us really knowing who is doing it?