alt Hacker NewsA profitable satellite company with a lot of debt and satellites that target the previous model of bespoke terminals when the market is moving to satellite service on regular phones.
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Iridium is launching 5G standards-based direct-to-device capabilities this year: https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-ntn-direct
I'm not sure if that kind of great replacement theories stand anymore. That happened once with iPhone, and... what else? All the direct-to-cell stuffs are limited to simple texts as well. IIUC they require the phones to be out in the wild with nobody around and patient with the rituals of sending messages, like how earliest forms of GPS receivers worked. I don't see that changing that much in coming few years.
Iridium terminals can be very power-efficient. Consumer ones are the size of a deck of cards and can last for days.
> the market is moving to satellite service on regular phones.
I don’t think there a unified “market” here. The fixed rooftop terminals and fixed-ish roaming terminals use high (tens of GHz) frequencies with correspondingly wide bandwidth, have excellent beamforming capabilities and some degree of MIMO to improve spectrum reuse, and consume an amount of power that would be outrageous for a phone. Phones don’t have reliably clear views of the sky and have much weaker RF capabilities.
Oh, and phones are well served by existing 4G and 5G networks in dense areas, with better spectrum reuse than seems practical for a satellite constellation.
I expect that we will actually see two separate markets that happen to share the same satellites and backhaul.