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from the bluebird-bluebird-calling-me-far-away dept.
AST SpaceMobile gets US approval to test satellite-based cellular broadband:
AST SpaceMobile, a five-year-old company, based in Midland, Texas, has received a green light from the US Federal Communications Commission to test a satellite that could provide cellular broadband connectivity for smartphone users in the US and around the globe.
The company says it's building the first and only space-based cellular broadband network designed to be accessible directly by standard mobile phones. Its planned network, called SpaceMobile, aims to deliver 4G/5G connectivity everywhere on the planet – on land, at sea and in flight. Mobile subscribers would be able to automatically roam from land networks to the space-based network, no matter their location.
From SpaceNews:
The license from the Federal Communications Commission permits the company to connect unmodified cellular devices in Texas and Hawaii with BlueWalker 3 for up to several minutes daily.
SpaceX is slated to launch BlueWalker 3 to low Earth orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket with other passengers.
[...] "The BlueWalker 3 satellite would give us about five minutes of coverage in most areas around the world every day, which we plan to use to configure our software and other systems related to the network core," AST SpaceMobile chief strategy officer Scott Wisniewski told SpaceNews.
"Such coverage should also provide opportunities to explore numerous uses of cellular broadband, including texting, voice, and data applications."
Something tells me the cost of an iridium plan will be dropping soon.
At around 1,500-kilograms, BlueWalker 3 is a much smaller version of the company's planned operational BlueBird satellites AST SpaceMobile is building in-house. Each BlueBird will have a mass "well north" of BlueWalker 3, Wisniewski said, and have a larger field of view.
[...] The company expects to have deployed 110 satellites by the end of 2024 to achieve "substantial global" mobile coverage.
"We're designing BlueBirds for compatibility with numerous large launch vehicles that could deploy multiple operational satellites into orbit," Wisniewski said.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @12:24PM
Seemed unlikely to me as well, but apparently they already tried it.
With a big enough antenna in space, they seem to be able to work with the little one on the ground.
Not sure how many handsets they can focus on at once, but at least some bw to one.
https://spacenews.com/ast-spacemobile-licensed-to-connect-test-satellite-to-us-cellular-phones/ [spacenews.com]
The first proof of concept bird was in 2019.
This is a bigger test bird at 1500kg and 64sqmeter phased array antenna size.
The real bird will be bigger still.