Lynk Global (formerly Ubiquitilink)

[Danderman]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-startup-aims-to-connect-satellites-directly-with-cellphones-11550979518

[catdlr]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-startup-aims-to-connect-satellites-directly-with-cellphones-11550979518

Paywall.

[Tywin]

UbiquitiLink has built the first cell tower in space. Soon, everyone in the world will be connected, everywhere, with just the phone in their pocket. No new hardware required. No new software needed. The UbiquitiLink network will enable everyone with a standard mobile phone to stay connected … everywhere.

Today, only about 25 percent of the world’s landmass is served by cell towers. The rest of the land—and all of the world’s oceans—have no coverage.

The 5.2 billion people with mobile phones often have no service because they are outside the range of a cell tower.

Another 2.5 billion people, many in remote areas without cellular networks, don’t even have a mobile phone.

When disaster strikes, first responders are frequently hampered by inoperable terrestrial communications.

This is about to change. UbiquitiLink is creating a global constellation of satellites to connect the phones in our pockets anywhere on the planet, all of the time.

https://www.ubiquitilink.com/

[Danderman]

The big difference with Ubiquitilink is that customers don't need a special telephone, or some sort of interface device.

[Asteroza]

The only way you could reasonably pull this off right now without too much handwaving would be VLEO sats like those proposed by Tethers Unlimited, where a SpiderFab builds out the monster antenna array of big hex panels forming a shallow dish.


Hrm, UbiquitiLink says phase one is 24-36 sats at 500km. Tethers Unlimited GobalFi direct-smartphone broadband (DTSB) system says 27 sats for "Cell Towers In Space"

There's a small picture of the TUI sat at the end of a recent FISO telecon presentation on the last page which shows the reverse dish of hex panels.

http://fiso.spiritastro.net/telecon/Hoyt_12-13-17/

WPO patent regarding OrbWeaver and GlobalFi

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/15/b0/ab/360ff704471f16/WO2017123677A1.pdf

A pure 5G celltower in space with massively parallel beamforming would be pretty impressive...

[plugger.lockett]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-startup-aims-to-connect-satellites-directly-with-cellphones-11550979518

Paywall.

Outline.com
https://outline.com/dHhxE2

[gongora]

Hrm, UbiquitiLink says phase one is 24-36 sats at 500km. Tethers Unlimited GobalFi direct-smartphone broadband (DTSB) system says 27 sats for "Cell Towers In Space"

UbiquitiLink says they will need to orbit thousands of satellites for full coverage.

[Asteroza]

Hrm, UbiquitiLink says phase one is 24-36 sats at 500km. Tethers Unlimited GobalFi direct-smartphone broadband (DTSB) system says 27 sats for "Cell Towers In Space"

UbiquitiLink says they will need to orbit thousands of satellites for full coverage.

GlobalFi is in the same boat. 27 sats is for hourly coverage (IoT/alert oriented) I believe, according to the documents available

[Lar]

thousands of birds is good news for some launch provider or another, if the backing exists. If this follows trend, it won't be SpaceX because Starlink. But maybe, how much do these spaces overlap if they can get it to work?

[TrevorMonty]

Hrm, UbiquitiLink says phase one is 24-36 sats at 500km. Tethers Unlimited GobalFi direct-smartphone broadband (DTSB) system says 27 sats for "Cell Towers In Space"

UbiquitiLink says they will need to orbit thousands of satellites for full coverage.

For txt intermttent coverage eg once hour don't need that many. This will be initial market. No reason it can't support remote sensing equipment much same as IoT constellations.
Continous voice conversations will need a large constellation. Even voice could be done incrementally, eg 1hour window every 24hours. Phone home conversations just need to be planned.

[WindnWar]

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/25/ubiquitilink-advance-means-every-phone-is-now-a-satellite-phone/

According to that article the initial plan is to all 5 minutes of coverage every hour, then to build up the constellation until it's 24/7 coverage. 5 minutes every hour though would work well for lost hiker etc, app could tell you how long till your window opens so you can save battery until then. I wonder how weather will impact it? Only modification that was needed was for doppler timings to be increased as they were limited to 30km originally in the phone wireless chips.

Interesting concept. First test sats on orbit.

[Danderman]

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/25/ubiquitilink-advance-means-every-phone-is-now-a-satellite-phone/

According to that article the initial plan is to all 5 minutes of coverage every hour, then to build up the constellation until it's 24/7 coverage. 5 minutes every hour though would work well for lost hiker etc, app could tell you how long till your window opens so you can save battery until then. I wonder how weather will impact it? Only modification that was needed was for doppler timings to be increased as they were limited to 30km originally in the phone wireless chips.

Interesting concept. First test sats on orbit.

Nothing in the phone needs to be altered in the Ubiquitilink system, and Doppler is no problem.

[Danderman]

Hrm, UbiquitiLink says phase one is 24-36 sats at 500km. Tethers Unlimited GobalFi direct-smartphone broadband (DTSB) system says 27 sats for "Cell Towers In Space"

UbiquitiLink says they will need to orbit thousands of satellites for full coverage.

GlobalFi is in the same boat. 27 sats is for hourly coverage (IoT/alert oriented) I believe, according to the documents available

I wonder how TUI would get access to spectrum to communicate with cellphones.

[WindnWar]

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/25/ubiquitilink-advance-means-every-phone-is-now-a-satellite-phone/

According to that article the initial plan is to all 5 minutes of coverage every hour, then to build up the constellation until it's 24/7 coverage. 5 minutes every hour though would work well for lost hiker etc, app could tell you how long till your window opens so you can save battery until then. I wonder how weather will impact it? Only modification that was needed was for doppler timings to be increased as they were limited to 30km originally in the phone wireless chips.

Interesting concept. First test sats on orbit.

Nothing in the phone needs to be altered in the Ubiquitilink system, and Doppler is no problem.

I don't get that, as it states they had to modify the wireless stack in the phones in the article but then later says they don't need to modify the phones. Did they move the mods to just the sat side?

Or maybe I'm not understanding what they are describing.

[Lar]

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/25/ubiquitilink-advance-means-every-phone-is-now-a-satellite-phone/

According to that article the initial plan is to all 5 minutes of coverage every hour, then to build up the constellation until it's 24/7 coverage. 5 minutes every hour though would work well for lost hiker etc, app could tell you how long till your window opens so you can save battery until then. I wonder how weather will impact it? Only modification that was needed was for doppler timings to be increased as they were limited to 30km originally in the phone wireless chips.

Interesting concept. First test sats on orbit.

Nothing in the phone needs to be altered in the Ubiquitilink system, and Doppler is no problem.

I don't get that, as it states they had to modify the wireless stack in the phones in the article but then later says they don't need to modify the phones. Did they move the mods to just the sat side?

Or maybe I'm not understanding what they are describing.

Maybe they are not modifing the HARDWARE of the phones but when their app is installed (presumably they have an app) they have a custom stack or some updates to some components in the stack or something similar (a SOFTWARE change)    I'm confused too but ?

[Asteroza]

Assuming there isn't a hardware change needed (baked in doppler timings, etc), then it's either modifying the firmware of the chip (so talk to Qualcomm basically)(usually a binary blob loaded by the OS into the chip on boot), or if there are knobs for messing with it at the OS level, so one would modify the OS software radio stack settings. As commodity hardware gradually goes more to software defined architectures (so called SDR radios), the hardware is designed for a lot of flexibility, and limits are basically only imposed due to physical limits of the chips (frequency range for example) and limits in firmware or the SDR software stack level (such as regulatory transmit power limiters).

For reference, cheap chinese DTSB receiver USB dongles, designed for digital terrestrial television reception, were found to have unlocked firmware that turned them into fairly wideband scanners (and sometimes could even force transmission as well). The whole GPS spoofing thing that's come into vogue in the information security industry is a result of the flexibility of SDR systems.  For reference, two antivirus researchers in china, using SDR's and open source SDR software like GNU radio, and open GPS documents, were able to successfully spoof GPS in about a month of hobby time, despite no previous RF or serious EE experience.

For cellphones, which are generally more locked down however, whether the knobs to configure the radio are sufficient at the OS level will be the issue. Google (for android) provides some carrier profile services, so a satellite cellphone carrier could request to have the necessary profile with special settings delivered that way for general availability. Apple does their own carrier profile delivery, so a similar request would be necessary for the iPhone. General apps usually can't fiddle with low level settings that much, only read those settings. For unlocked/rooted android phones, the OS may be open but they still load proprietary binary firmware blobs for the radio chips, which are usually either compiled by the chip manufacturer, or the phone maker in a special closed build environment not open to the public (to protect source code provided by the chip maker). If the blob is fairly unrestricted (or one somehow found a fully unrestricted blob and swapped it), then there may be some possibilities there. But, based on the open information, the probability is a custom carrier profile. Which might be a problem for older dumbphones which don't have the software hooks for this, but at this stage, the odds of a true 5G dumbphone existing are low, and many if not most 4G LTE dumbphones are really stripped down android phones with the touch interface removed.

I would find it hard to believe that they would operate a 3G system, and 4G LTE might be pushing it despite the large addressable market, as the protocol and spectrum usage by 5G is far better than 4G LTE. 4G is unfortunately a fairly wide range of supported transmission types and speeds, so saying you support 4G means weighing yourself down with a lot of legacy cruft. There is a secondary concern regarding VoLTE, which is where the carrier and protocol support voice operations using an all data VoIP system running over the data channels, rather than separate voice specific channels which must be reserved for voice use. Running VoLTE means the entire system is pure data channel based which improves spectral efficiency, but also requires handsets that support VoLTE (though most handsets on sale now do support it). VoLTE has some quirks though if the carrier runs a mixed environment (call handoff between VoLTE and non-VoLTE towers becomes complex). Timing wise, by the time they launch this minimum constellation 5G phone availability should be pretty good though (perhaps enough to offset the loss of not supporting 4G LTE).

[saliva_sweet]

Is this a hoax? I don't think a cellphone has enough power to talk to a satellite. At least not according to this:
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/far-can-cell-tower-cellphone-pick-up-signal-32124.html

[Danderman]

Is this a hoax? I don't think a cellphone has enough power to talk to a satellite. At least not according to this:
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/far-can-cell-tower-cellphone-pick-up-signal-32124.html

UBL has patented technology that allows a cellphone to communicate with UBL satellites.

Cellphones do not have to be modified in the operational constellation. I believe there were modifications to SIM cards for previous tests for convenience of testers.

There is no UBL app required for communications with satellites, but an app, or set of routines could have use in the system down the road.

[niwax]

Is this a hoax? I don't think a cellphone has enough power to talk to a satellite. At least not according to this:
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/far-can-cell-tower-cellphone-pick-up-signal-32124.html

Cellphones have plenty of power to talk to satellites, that's how SIGINT satellites in GEO work. They're not ordinarily designed to make it easy to talk to one, though. I assume that's what the modifications in their software are about, they might make the phone ignore that it's not receiving a strong, timely response from a tower.

[Danderman]

Is this a hoax? I don't think a cellphone has enough power to talk to a satellite. At least not according to this:
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/far-can-cell-tower-cellphone-pick-up-signal-32124.html

Cellphones have plenty of power to talk to satellites, that's how SIGINT satellites in GEO work. They're not ordinarily designed to make it easy to talk to one, though. I assume that's what the modifications in their software are about, they might make the phone ignore that it's not receiving a strong, timely response from a tower.

To be clear, UBL does not require any modification to the cell phone’s software for basic communications.