How can it be that a LTE smartphone, costing ~$100 and doing all the things a smart phone can do, and being designed to connect to a cell network via a tower a few miles away, can somehow also function as the pizza sized $500 Starlink dish?

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kortilla a year ago | parent | next [-]

It doesn’t. The throughput here is multiple orders of magnitude lower than what you get from Starlink

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CtrlAltmanDel a year ago | parent [-]

I keep coming back to the comments waiting to see how many orders of magnitude lower. 1 Mbps would be quite different than 10 kbps. Is this for facetime while camping, or send an SOS if your car breaks down in the backroads?

	▲	verzali a year ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's much closer to the SOS. They start with text messaging, which is much easier because it's low bandwidth and tolerant of delays. Voice can also be done at low bandwidth but its a bit harder to ensure things sound smooth. And then data, but I think this will only ever be low bandwidth like internet browsing, not tiktok or facetime. There's probably a reason they aren't boasting about the bandwidth they can achieve...
	▲	Mashimo a year ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It will start of with text messaged only. That should give you an idea about the throughput.

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maccam94 a year ago | parent | prev [-]

It uses a different transceiver on the satellite which is broadcasting a ~standard LTE signal, at a miniscule data rate