I was recently in a country that strictly controls internet communications. Like, total lockdown absolutely forbidden levels of control. I spent my time there constantly wondering about the inevitable advent of ubiquitous wireless communication via things like Starlink and what the effects would be on these totalitarian regimes.
Edit: I didn't mean to focus on Starlink specifically. Eventually it won't just be Starlink up there, and likely our mobile devices will need less and less power to communicate with those satellites. So I'm less interested in the effects of Starlink and more on satellite communications generally.
Starlink blocks access to specific countries that it doesn't have approval to work in, so I presume they'll just be blocked while the totalitarian regimes are in power.
I don't think this is the case. They don't sell hardware/service in countries they don't have approval to operate in, but their global roam service operates in places they don't have an operation license for, which is why south Africa is pissed off [1]
Assuming Starlink is really willing to violate local frequency licensing requirements (which I doubt they'd dare for all but the most internationally isolated countries without anti-satellite weapons), given the low transmit powers, local wireless jammers should be relatively easy to implement.
> given the low transmit powers, local wireless jammers should be relatively easy to implement.
Not true. Both the transmitter and receiver (in both directions) utilize phased arrays. This means the receiver is very good at rejecting noise angularly separated from the expected location of the transmitter. Geometry dictates that jamming could be somewhat effective against upload (i.e. if the jammer is located roughly within the size of a spot beam from the transmitting dish), but is almost completely ineffective in the download direction.
This is all fairly theoretical since much of the details aren't publicly available; but as evidence I point to the fact that Russia has poured a huge amount of money into EW and, despite having considerable motivation to deny Starlink access, has consistently failed to prevent its widespread use by Ukrainian troops on frontlines mere kilometers from its own forces.
I have lost hope that human can fight totalitarianism, regardless the new technology been used. It is like the low energy state of society, similar to a ball tends roll down the hill, it is easier for a country to enter the totalitarian state and stays there than to get out of it by itself. Imagine a North Korean owns a such cell phone, according to rumors, it is a crime if the spouse, children, or neighbors don’t report to the authorities. Governments can also jam communication, just like they jam radio programs and censor Internet. A more likely scenario would be regimes use new technology, including direct cell phone to satellite communication, to monitor and control people.
I wouldn't call it "The new cellphone towers" as if satellite service will replace ground based. Because it won't.
Starlink direct to cell will still cover huge areas per cell which is great for remote areas but not for high density like cities. It will not have strong enough signals to penetrate buildings. And it won't provide enough bandwidth for more than texts at least not for now.
It's an augmentation of the land based service, not a replacement.
> And it won't provide enough bandwidth for more than texts at least not for now.
So are we back to 14k modem speed for Satellites data now?
Hopefully this will bring back website that is focus being on being lightweight, and just display information (or gemini type of alternative), and discourage the SPA development fiasco that has happened.
> So are we back to 14k modem speed for Satellites data now?
Not 'back'. This is normal for satellite data other than static Starlink installs with their huge antenna. The iridium Go! Hotspot does about 2400 bps :) they also have a new note expensive version that does up to 88 kbps download and 22 up. Still dialup speed so?
SPAs should/could in general be more tolerant of restricted bandwidth, and more responsive in that environment.
If you download all the UI elements, layout, and styling up-front, and then only have to communicate with the server to fetch structured data that tells the app how to change the user interface, that's strictly better.
The issue, of course, is that most pages (regardless of whether they're SPAs or not) require a large amount of bandwidth to download assets.
But I would expect that a low-bandwidth SPA would be more responsive than a traditional low-bandwidth website where it has to reload the full page every time you do something.
When satellites first appeared the future was going to be satellites. It turned out that the future was land-based optic fibres because of thoughput, latency, and capacity.
Maybe the carriers’ marketing departments will hand out little 4 bar stickers to put in the upper corners of your phone while they loudly proclaim “full bars everywhere!” Of course, conveniently continuing to ignore latency in the mobile core, which is what increasingly impacts end user quality of service more than “bars.”
These satellites are around 500 km up. Round-trip latency is less than 10 ms if you’re somewhat close to a ground station, and if you’re not, odds are you’re not that close to your application server either and would have comparable latency in fiber.
I never before considered that "the edge" may become a constellation of Starlink satellites. Round-trip latency is a lot better if your messages are only going 500km.
That said — can you imagine deploying your service to ~5200 satellites? yikes
Why you should if you don't have to ? Satellite phones are a thing at least since the 90s, but nowadays you prefer some kind of communication via Internet, possibly using wifi. Ok, emergency call, place out the civilisation, but those are same use case present 30 years ago. If you don't have to you want to use real cell towers or wifi. Also I think that to cover the communication needs of a single western rich country they have to increase the number of satellite drastically, with lot of side effects. So really satellites aren't new cell towers. Besides, is that type of infrastructure so profitable to justify its creation ? I want to say, if I wasn't able to do an emergency call the problem was dead battery, not absence of signal, in other cases I use the ol' dirty Marconi's wireless telegraph: the radio. Obviously , if I have a way to send sms from desert place, it's a "nice to have feature" not a necessity for the majority of us, so, again , how the company want to monetise from the infrastructure that is greatly expensive ?
I essentially pay a bunch of money to garmin so i can text people while camping and offroading and send tiny amounts of data to update my position on a map.
I got a iPhone 14 for a backup satellite sos method.
In Canada there are 100s of km of roads between towns with zero cellphone service, often for hours at a time. Having space based communication in a cellphone to fall back on would be extreme valuable and life saving to many. I know I already pay a bundle for it and many of my outdoorsy friends do the same. I can be driving to a friends house a few hours away and be out of signal for half of it, being able to call for help if I encounter or get into an accident is pretty important and building cell towers would be far more expensive then some satellites
> send tiny amounts of data to update my position on a map
If you could clarify- is this data like mobile data/internet, or data in a literal sense? Because if you’re SMSing your GPS coordinates to a friend’s phone you could stick to only SMS.
Another thing to consider is how much the bands dedicated to cell phones are already saturated in dense urban environments. I don't see how a few thousands satellites would be able to scale if they were to replace our actual cell towers (some of them consisting of local cells on utility poles, etc.).
And also, satellites dedicated to search and rescue to locate emergency beacons already exist, and you don't need many of them to cover the whole planet.
> Another thing to consider is how much the bands dedicated to cell phones are already saturated in dense urban environments.
That's what 5G is supposed to be for. In dense areas, there are supposed to be a large number of tiny cells operating in the 5GHz-6GHz range. The main application for this is stadiums, so the fans can be getting video on their phone while watching, or not watching, the dame. Most of the NFL stadiums now have this.
It’s hard to bet against human determination but on the face of it, it seems out of reach to put satellite voice calls in a package the size of an iPhone.
The power requirements and thus the bulky batteries of existing satellite phones could be reduced by switching to protocols which trade off bandwidth for higher error correction abilities through encoding and I don’t think existing satellite phones use the most bandwidth efficient encoding available so that could be another improvement.
There’s still the free space path loss between the surface of earth and a Globalstar or Starlink which my best guess estimate is in the order of 130db (can anyone more knowledgeable share a better estimate? I assumed bottom end of L-band, a height between Starlink and Globalstar, and used unverified dBi values for antennas at both ends).
Then there’s latency but I don’t think that’s a show stopper for many common use cases of voice and data.
> The power requirements and thus the bulky batteries of existing satellite phones could be reduced by switching to protocols which trade off bandwidth for higher error correction abilities
No, you can’t trade bandwidth against error correction. What you can do is use channel coding/error correction to trade effective signal-to-noise strength against data rate (at constant power).
But since your data rate demand is fixed for voice, and the uplink transmit power is fixed too (by 4G/5G specs), you need to raise the received signal strength. The only thing that can help you there are more directional receive antennas on the satellites, which is what these new generations are doing.
To be clear, what's happening here is people are accustomed to using "bandwidth" to mean bits/second but bandwidth has a much more specific meaning in the RF world, akin to calling Ethernet "SSH".
Bandwidth is the actual number of kilo/mega/gigahertz the signal occupies on the spectrum and is largely a function of symbol rate, but the actual data rate has many more variables.
You can talk to satellites over lora with a 5w transceiver (source: done it), which is on the order of magnitude of a cell phone transceiver. Opus goes down to .75kbps. Ham boomerisms don't cleanly apply to modern voice codecs and digital modulation techniques.
How do you do LoRa over a sat? I thought the chirping makes that difficult because you exceed the passband on the sat? Interesting! Which sat did you use?
I don't love this model. It feels so censorable and state-adjacent. All states need to do is convince whoever controls the satellites to accept their terms. It's such a small number of points of failure.
The mesh model, where every rooftop is a node routing encrypted traffic to neighbors, feels much more sustainable / forward-looking to me.
The mesh model is a nice idea, but does not work in low/no population areas, plus across long distances. Coincidentally that's exactly where satellites shine.
Something I have wondered about is how can a layman like me could communicate with a satellite? I would need an antenna of some sort I believe but then what's the protocol?
There are amateur radio satellites that you can legally communicate with using a technician’s license and equipment for around $100 (essentially a UHF/VHF FM walkie-talkie and an external antenna, i.e. just analog voice).
If you have a fairly modern iPhone, you can already share your location to a satellite out of the box.
And if unidirectional communication counts, you already do it every time you use GPS :)
There are amateur radio satellites. You would need to get your amateur radio license, although you can listen without it. Then you need handheld radio. Two, or more expensive dual band, if want to transmit. It is possible to use the builtin antenna. But lots of people use directional Yagi antennas, you can build cheap one.
Most of satellites you don’t talk to, the satellite repeats signals. People talk to each other, mainly to make contacts, using the satellite.
IIRC there are some open packet data protocol intended as cost saving measures, but nothing mandatory or ubiquitous as Ethernet or RS-232C in PCs. A primer/tutorial level for hobbyist satellite communication is weather satellite reception using RTL-SDR.
I doubt Crown Castle and American Tower will be much affected, it might reduce some new rural deployments, but other contracts like Firstnet also increased requirements for rural buildout, so it's not going away. Indoors isn't going to be covered by satellite beams.
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Edit: I didn't mean to focus on Starlink specifically. Eventually it won't just be Starlink up there, and likely our mobile devices will need less and less power to communicate with those satellites. So I'm less interested in the effects of Starlink and more on satellite communications generally.
[1]: https://www.itweb.co.za/article/icasa-takes-note-of-illegal-...
Not true. Both the transmitter and receiver (in both directions) utilize phased arrays. This means the receiver is very good at rejecting noise angularly separated from the expected location of the transmitter. Geometry dictates that jamming could be somewhat effective against upload (i.e. if the jammer is located roughly within the size of a spot beam from the transmitting dish), but is almost completely ineffective in the download direction.
This is all fairly theoretical since much of the details aren't publicly available; but as evidence I point to the fact that Russia has poured a huge amount of money into EW and, despite having considerable motivation to deny Starlink access, has consistently failed to prevent its widespread use by Ukrainian troops on frontlines mere kilometers from its own forces.
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In addition, as others have mentioned, companies do not like to take on whole countries unless perhaps it is a very small and irrelevant one.
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Starlink direct to cell will still cover huge areas per cell which is great for remote areas but not for high density like cities. It will not have strong enough signals to penetrate buildings. And it won't provide enough bandwidth for more than texts at least not for now.
It's an augmentation of the land based service, not a replacement.
Hopefully this will bring back website that is focus being on being lightweight, and just display information (or gemini type of alternative), and discourage the SPA development fiasco that has happened.
Not 'back'. This is normal for satellite data other than static Starlink installs with their huge antenna. The iridium Go! Hotspot does about 2400 bps :) they also have a new note expensive version that does up to 88 kbps download and 22 up. Still dialup speed so?
If you download all the UI elements, layout, and styling up-front, and then only have to communicate with the server to fetch structured data that tells the app how to change the user interface, that's strictly better.
The issue, of course, is that most pages (regardless of whether they're SPAs or not) require a large amount of bandwidth to download assets.
But I would expect that a low-bandwidth SPA would be more responsive than a traditional low-bandwidth website where it has to reload the full page every time you do something.
That said — can you imagine deploying your service to ~5200 satellites? yikes
I got a iPhone 14 for a backup satellite sos method.
In Canada there are 100s of km of roads between towns with zero cellphone service, often for hours at a time. Having space based communication in a cellphone to fall back on would be extreme valuable and life saving to many. I know I already pay a bundle for it and many of my outdoorsy friends do the same. I can be driving to a friends house a few hours away and be out of signal for half of it, being able to call for help if I encounter or get into an accident is pretty important and building cell towers would be far more expensive then some satellites
If you could clarify- is this data like mobile data/internet, or data in a literal sense? Because if you’re SMSing your GPS coordinates to a friend’s phone you could stick to only SMS.
Historic.
Another thing to consider is how much the bands dedicated to cell phones are already saturated in dense urban environments. I don't see how a few thousands satellites would be able to scale if they were to replace our actual cell towers (some of them consisting of local cells on utility poles, etc.).
And also, satellites dedicated to search and rescue to locate emergency beacons already exist, and you don't need many of them to cover the whole planet.
That's what 5G is supposed to be for. In dense areas, there are supposed to be a large number of tiny cells operating in the 5GHz-6GHz range. The main application for this is stadiums, so the fans can be getting video on their phone while watching, or not watching, the dame. Most of the NFL stadiums now have this.
Other parts of cities, not so much yet.
The power requirements and thus the bulky batteries of existing satellite phones could be reduced by switching to protocols which trade off bandwidth for higher error correction abilities through encoding and I don’t think existing satellite phones use the most bandwidth efficient encoding available so that could be another improvement.
There’s still the free space path loss between the surface of earth and a Globalstar or Starlink which my best guess estimate is in the order of 130db (can anyone more knowledgeable share a better estimate? I assumed bottom end of L-band, a height between Starlink and Globalstar, and used unverified dBi values for antennas at both ends).
Then there’s latency but I don’t think that’s a show stopper for many common use cases of voice and data.
No, you can’t trade bandwidth against error correction. What you can do is use channel coding/error correction to trade effective signal-to-noise strength against data rate (at constant power).
But since your data rate demand is fixed for voice, and the uplink transmit power is fixed too (by 4G/5G specs), you need to raise the received signal strength. The only thing that can help you there are more directional receive antennas on the satellites, which is what these new generations are doing.
Bandwidth is the actual number of kilo/mega/gigahertz the signal occupies on the spectrum and is largely a function of symbol rate, but the actual data rate has many more variables.
The mesh model, where every rooftop is a node routing encrypted traffic to neighbors, feels much more sustainable / forward-looking to me.
There are amateur radio satellites that you can legally communicate with using a technician’s license and equipment for around $100 (essentially a UHF/VHF FM walkie-talkie and an external antenna, i.e. just analog voice).
If you have a fairly modern iPhone, you can already share your location to a satellite out of the box.
And if unidirectional communication counts, you already do it every time you use GPS :)
Most of satellites you don’t talk to, the satellite repeats signals. People talk to each other, mainly to make contacts, using the satellite.
It is also possible to talk to ISS.
1: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weat...
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