Comment by ck2
11 hours ago
I am curious how phones now can reach LEO for enough bandwidth for voice calls but you need a full dish, however small, for starlink?
Could you get at least 1mbps from a phone to LEO now for email and non-realtime data?
11 hours ago
I am curious how phones now can reach LEO for enough bandwidth for voice calls but you need a full dish, however small, for starlink?
Could you get at least 1mbps from a phone to LEO now for email and non-realtime data?
Link budget cuts both ways. If your user terminal sucks, you can compensate somewhat - by building a larger, beefier satellite that has better antenna directionality and pumps out more transmission juice, and throwing the data rate under the bus. This is how it's done now.
Having a terminal that doesn't suck puts less strain on the satellite side and, thus, scales better. But for emergencies and serving middle of nowhere, "direct to cell" makes sense.
You pretty much nailed it, its all about bandwidth.
The emergency SOS feature is optimized down to the byte to ensure it can work with poor signal and low bandwidth.