This rendering of AST SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker 3 test satellite, launched on 10 September 2022, shows the satellite’s appearance when the antennas are fully deployed. The antennas’ surface area—64 square meters—enables the satellite to function as a long-distance cell tower for phones on Earth’s surface.
In 2023, you or someone you know will be able to send a text message through space. Late in 2022, hardware behemoths Huawei and Apple released cellular telephones capable of texting on traditional satellite-communications networks. A pair of ambitious startups, AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global, also started building new low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks designed to reach conventional 5G cellphones outside terrestrial coverage.
“Offering direct satellite access to smartphones without modifications would allow access to billions of devices worldwide,” says
Symeon Chatzinotas, the head of the University of Luxembourg’s SigCom research group.
Users looking to connect via satellite won’t need the bulky, expensive commercial satphones that
have been available since the late 1990s—but they also won’t have conventional calling or high-bandwidth data streaming just yet. Satellite connections are still plenty useful, though. To begin with, people could use texting to signal for help if need be, no matter where they are, as long as they have a clear view of the sky. That is, their mobile phones will have capabilities similar to existing pocket devices like Garmin’s inReach communicator.
Huawei has not said when its service will begin working, but Apple’s partnership with Globalstar, dubbed
Emergency SOS via satellite, has been operational since November 2022. As of this writing, Lynk Global has agreements with 23 telecom providers to begin commercial operations in 2023. AST SpaceMobile says it plans to launch its first five commercial satellites late in 2023, has agreements or understandings with more than 25 telecom providers around the world, and should begin commercial operations in 2024.
An AST SpaceMobile employee sets up a test unit of the BlueWalker 3 satellite’s modular antenna array; the final array includes 148 such units.AST SpaceMobile
Splashy announcements of
satellite-cellular connectivity from Apple, Starlink, and T-Mobile in the third quarter of 2022 promoted the idea of anywhere, any-kind connectivity. The first services won’t be that slick, though. Apple and Huawei will both connect initially to older satellites in higher orbits, for which it could take more than 10 minutes to establish a connection. Even the newer LEO networks, such as Lynk Global’s, currently advertise satellite texting but are not yet promising the higher-c
