alt Hacker NewsOnly for companies that choose to make or support phones with Iridium connectivity included, as opposed to AST and Starlink targeting existing phones.
Only for companies that choose to make or support phones with Iridium connectivity included, as opposed to AST and Starlink targeting existing phones.
Kind of: Phones will probably need some Iridium-specific RF hardware (unless their existing baseband and amplifiers happen to cover the band it uses), but the baseband and signaling stack won’t be proprietary anymore if I understand it correctly.
Several mass-market phones already are IoT-NTN compatible, e.g. Google’s Pixel line.