https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/03/07/a-new-firm-says-it-can-link-satellites-to-ordinary-smartphones

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Science & technology | Call from the heavens

A new firm says it can link satellites to ordinary smartphones

If it works, there will be no escaping a mobile signal

[20200307_STP502]
Mar 7th 2020
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SMARTPHONES GIVE people access to each other and to the internet when
they are on the move--but only where there is network coverage.
Satellite constellations, like those being built by SpaceX, OneWeb
and Amazon, will provide broadband access anywhere on the planet, but
will not talk directly to existing telephone handsets (they will
instead require small receiving stations on the ground, to act as
gateways). By contrast Abel Avellan, the founder of an American firm
called AST & Science, claims to have invented a way to provide the
best of both worlds: satellite connectivity that works anywhere on
the planet and yet is accessible directly, via existing handsets.

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AST & Science emerged from "stealth mode" this week. It dubs its
service "SpaceMobile". Mr Avellan, a veteran of the satellite
industry, says he has spent years devising a way to get satellites to
talk directly to ordinary phones. The result is an unusually large
satellite that is capable of picking up a handset's feeble signal,
and also of broadcasting directly back to that handset. The satellite
acts as a relay between the handset and existing antennas on the
ground that are connected to cellular networks. In short, the
satellite is not an orbiting base-station, but a radio repeater.

Mr Avellan says this approach can work with 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G
networks, providing access in remote areas of land that currently
have no coverage, and also on planes and at sea. SpaceMobile will, he
says, launch a network of "a few hundred" satellites to provide
global coverage. That compares with the 12,000 planned by SpaceX.

The company tested its technology in an unusual way. Last April,
rather than launching a prototype of one of its large satellites, it
kept the prototype on the ground and instead launched a tiny
satellite to create what was, in effect, an orbiting handset. Even
though the positions of relay and handset were thus reversed, their
relative motions were the same as they would have been if the
satellite had been in space and the handset on the ground.

Mr Avellan says the tests were successful. And on March 3rd his firm
announced that Vodafone, a mobile-telecommunications giant, and
Rakuten, a Japanese conglomerate, have joined the project as
investors. Other backers include Samsung, a big handset manufacturer,
and American Tower, which operates wireless-communications
infrastructure around the world.

Such companies would not have backed SpaceMobile if they did not
think the technology had a good chance of working. But not everyone
is convinced. One industry insider, who has previously been involved
with the SpaceX and OneWeb satellite projects, says getting handsets
to talk directly to satellites means overcoming a huge number of
problems relating to power requirements, propagation delay,
allocation of frequency bands, interference and cross-border
regulation.

Mr Avellan says he has solved all these problems, and has filed
around 30 patents in the process of doing so, though he has yet to
reveal full details of how his system works. He says the satellites
switch on and off depending on which territory they are over, and use
mobile operators' existing frequency bands when active. Access to the
service will be sold wholesale to operating partners, who can then
offer SpaceMobile to customers as a global roaming option.

As well as working with existing phones, without the need for
terrestrial gateways, Mr Avellan says that because his system needs
far fewer satellites than its mega-constellation rivals, and thus
fewer launches, it will be cheaper to build. As for pricing, he says
access will be cheap enough for it to be used as a gap-filling
technology in poor countries, where coverage can be patchy in rural
areas. Such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Now
he must prove that his scheme will fly.#

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the
print edition under the headline "A call from the heavens"

Science & technology March 7th 2020

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  * A new firm says it can link satellites to ordinary smartphones
  * Which is really the weaker sex?

The right medicine for the world economy

From the March 7th 2020 edition

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