I’m interested to see what will be announced by T-Mobile and SpaceX later this evening. SpaceX posted this on their Twitter account yesterday:
My guess is Starlink backhaul for remote T-mobile towers to expand their footprint. It’ll be much easier for them to connect to Starlink than run fiber to hard to reach places.
Also yesterday Apple dropped the invite for their latest iPhone event. No, I was not invited but I did see what the invite looked like from what others have posted:
Apple’s Tweet announcing the event also alludes to an outer space theme:
My guess on Apple’s announcement is that new iPhones will work with the Globalstar constellation of low earth orbiting satellites. A few months ago Globalstar announced a major deal with a “global customer” for some form of connectivity from their satellites.
But don’t you need a huge dish for this? Nope! As I demo’ed the other day a handheld radio can get short messages (and sometimes full voice communications) back and forth to the International Space Station. Larger antennas make it easier of course but if there’s a satellite always overhead the challenge of getting a message delivered is reduced significantly.
I did a whole video about this a few months ago. You can check it out here!