Sat-to-phone ambitions may need course corrections

Much of the opening banter about satellite-to-phone services at the recent Satellite 2024 trade show in Washington, DC, bubbled with optimism that connectivity from space would soon lift off from being a slide in a PowerPoint deck to become a routine notification icon on a smartphone’s screen.

“The total addressable market is almost as big as the entire satellite industry,” declared Dan Dooley, chief commercial officer of Lynk Global, in a Satellite 2024 morning panel. He predicted a future of seamless satellite backup to terrestrial service: “My kids, my grandkids, won’t even know whether they’re on satellite.”

Sitting alongside Dooley, Qualcomm product-management VP Francesco Grilli urged carriers and manufacturers to look past sat-to-phone startup costs: “Even a tiny change in market share for an operator or a handset manufacturer could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in difference in revenues and profits.”

Multiple speakers emphasized how quickly satellites could allow a mobile operator to vault from patchy to complete coverage. 

Lim Kian Soon, VP for satellite at Singtel, pointed to that Singapore-based carrier’s business in Australia, where terrestrial coverage only serves about 30% of that continent: “With … just a few satellites, you can go from 30% to 100% coverage.”

And FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel offered her own vote of confidence a week after the commission voted to approve a framework for supplemental coverage from space.

“For us to reach everyone, everywhere, at any time, we need satellites,” she said. “We want to make it possible that there’s always a backup in the skies.” 

Launch constraints

But it was equally remarkable to see the red flags waved by speakers about how well sat-to-phone service could scale to meet broadband demand and how many people would be willing to pay to yield a profit for the companies involved. 

Download speeds haven’t been a concern with the one service today available in the US mass market, Globalstar’s emergency-messaging service for newer iPhones. And T-Mobile’s plans to offer roaming via SpaceX’s Starlink also envisage a text-only offering at the start.

But AT&T’s ambitions with AST SpaceMobile risk raising customer expectations that direct-to-cell technology may not be able to meet. AT&T network head Chris Sambar promised “true broadband capability” via AT&T’s deal with AST SpaceMobile. Other contenders have comparable plans.

“The topic of data density is a key issue,” said Mark Hogenboom, special projects director at Nokia. And while terrestrial operators can split cells easily and add spectrum less easily, both are a lot harder when the cell towers are a few hundred miles up. 

“If you are expecting here to have the same experience on satellite that you would on a cellular network, then you are going to be disappointed,” warned Thomas Scott Jensen, strategic alliances director at Gatehouse Satcom. He suggested that download speeds of 1 Mbit/s would still be doable, adding “you can still do some streaming.”

(At MWC Barcelona, AST SpaceMobile said the power of the giant phased-array antennas on its satellites, combined with upcoming capacity improvements in newer generations of them, would keep its capacity ahead of demand with an initial global-service constellation of just 90 satellites.)

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