The firms revealed plans on Thursday to link customers’ mobile phones directly to satellites in orbit by using Elon Musk-owned SpaceX’s Starlink satellites to give mobile users with network access in some areas of the United States.
Musk announced the new plans at a flashy event on Thursday at his company’s south Texas rocket facility. The new plans, which would coexist with T-current mobile’s cellular services, would do away with the need for cell towers and offer service for sending texts and images where cell coverage is not currently available, key for emergencies in remote areas.
T-mid-band Mobile’s spectrum will be utilised by Starlink’s satellites to build a new network. The majority of the company’s customers’ phones will be compatible with the new service, which will launch with messaging services by the end of next year in a beta phase.
In comparison to competitors OneWeb and Amazon.com Inc.’s Project Kuiper, SpaceX has launched almost 3,000 low-Earth orbiting Starlink satellites since 2019.
SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink satellites, the first of which are planned to launch on SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket whenever it is fully developed, will have larger antennae that will allow connectivity directly to mobile phones on the T-mobile network, Musk stated. “We are constructing special antenna. They are actually very big antenna that are extremely advanced,” he said. “The important thing is you will not need to get a new phone. The phone you currently have will work.”
American telecom companies are currently competing to build out the mid-band component of their 5G networks to catch up to T-Mobile, which just acquired rival Sprint and acquired a sizable 2.5 GHz of mid-band spectrum.
Because it offers a fair combination of capacity and coverage, mid-band, also known as C-Band, has proven to be the ideal band for 5G. After the messaging services beta phase, the carrier stated that it intends to pursue voice and data coverage. A worldwide cellular broadband network in space is also being built by satellite communications company AST SpaceMobile Inc (ASTS.O), which will work with mobile devices without the need for additional gear.
