No they sell a story to investors.

Right now we do not even have the antenna technology in current high end smartphones for 'easy to use, normal speed' mobile to satelite communication.

And funny enough, the more local mobile phones you would have, which want to send data to a satelite, the harder the problem gets due to interference.

With 5g we do already a lot of beam forming etc. Try beamforming into 500km space with uncoordinated random amount of mobile devices with very very little sending power and one satelite 'beamforming' its a few hundred square miles.

> to compete with major carriers worldwide.

I don't see a reason why countries with existing carriers would allow that, given the owner's stance about political meddling.