Starlink has made an important breakthrough in the mission to commercialize smartphone telephony via satellite. That happened with an unmodified Samsung phone.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that his company has managed to achieve a peak download speed of 17 Mbps via the satellite connection. Musk shared a screenshot of that speedtest.
Technicians who traced the serial number of the device discovered that it is a Verizon model of Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra (128GB).
The experiment shows that it is perfectly possible to establish a satellite connection with existing commercial satellites and consumer smartphones. To this end, SpaceX has collaborated with T-Mobile in recent months. If the experiment can be scaled up, it could be the basis for satellite telephony in remote areas, where people often suffer from poor mobile coverage.
Better satellites needed
While a peak speed of 17 Mbps is sufficient for audio calls, it may not be enough for smooth video calling. For the time being, it is not ideal to use apps with a lot of data traffic. Apart from that, it is a breakthrough for consumer telephony and satellite calling can be very useful in emergency situations.
Major manufacturers such as Google are also looking at satellite connections for their future devices. For example, last week a settings page could be seen on a screenshot from One UI 6.1. That software shell may make its debut with the Galaxy S24 smartphones. This means that in the event of an emergency, no partnerships are required between providers and communication can take place purely via satellite.
To make smartphone telephony via satellite really practical, data speeds will have to be increased. Starlink and its competitors may look for ways to improve their satellite performance through larger dishes, higher capacity satellites and multi-access technology.