And so it begins: (Sep 30, 2023)
It's worth noting that the row between Omnispace and SX began many many months ago. Its also worth noting that SX is just as culpable for playing the same fedagency/regulatory/filing games everyone else gets castrated for (eg, see SX messing with Globlastar, see SX's objection to the Viasat/Imarsat merger...and that's just what's in public domain...).
Anyway, TLDR on this one, SX interference will effectively raise Omnispace's noise floor by 3db. (ITU recommends 1db.) That's a big difference leading to ~50% reduction in an omnispace satellite capacity. SX's position is that there are other Omnispace satellites in coverage that won't be nearly as affected and so they should be fine, but that perspective doesn't quite land when one lacks billions of dollars to build out a constellation with massive coverage overlaps. Omnispace needs to eke out every bit of performance out of every satellite in order to get anywhere close to staying alive. SX prevailing on this one will effectively kill omnispace simply because they don't have enough money to build out a gigantor constellation.
General consensus seems to be that SX will likely prevail because omnispace--or at least this version of omnispace, with their own constellation--is generally seen as likely to fail anyway. (Monetization in the Direct To Device space is a bear.)
I still find it incredible they are planning to test connectivity to "unmodified cell phones" ...
AST has been communicating with blue walker through an off the shelf mobile device and in fact recently made an actual phone call. And of course, Apple now has two generations of iPhones providing satellite connectivity.
For some background, the "unmodified phone" moniker was originally created to be dismissive of Apple's approach to solving the D2D spectrum problem using existing MSS bands that historically haven't been built into mobile phones. It's not wrong I suppose, but I can't remember the last time I heard someone talking about how their new phone was "modified" so they could operate on 5G compared to their old 4G phone, and Apple’s update is simply the way all technology gets updated. So…the origin of ‘unmodified phone’ is a bit dubious IMO.
Waxing aside, it shouldn't be any great accomplishment for SX to follow in the footsteps of AST and Apple and successfully have an off the shelf mobile device [usefully] communicate with a satellite. It still--as has always been the case--remains to be seen if the expense of D2D can be sufficiently monetized. Commercial success of D2D is going to be the incredible thing in this space. Hell,
breaking even is going to be incredible.
Good news! Those of us with T-Mobile in SoCal are outside of cell service a lot, the service is crap.
Obviously more-than-nothing is infinitely better than nothing, so of course from that perspective it’s great news. But...don't set your expectations too high. It will probably start off similar to Apple's service, maybe with best-effort texting on top of that. Something close to the full contemplated T-mobile constellation (which I'd guess isn't
every starlink sat, since thousands of D2D antennas would really hit the asymptote of usefulness) won't have any problem supporting 'normal' texting, plus probably some additional functions that don't require a lot of constant low lag load (maps, etc), plus some third party API-ing (WhatsApp or whatever The Kids use these days, etc.). But...you're never going to get anywhere close to a "regular 5g experience" with heavy loads like streaming/gaming through a satellite and a mobile phone. Calls might not even be a thing, could be pretty throttled/limited, or may be only reserved for 911. (I mean, only monsters and people in emergencies make phone calls anyway so I guess no big loss there, but it's still worth mentioning. )
Importantly, you're also pretty much looking at service only when you're outdoor and in an unoccluded setting, due to the difficulty in closing what is always going to be a pretty marginal link. (In a car will likely be hit or miss...probably mostly ok for texting, especially if you have some patience for retries.)
A big unknown is that T-mobile needs to pay SX for the service hosting (call it $1B/year) and so you'll need to pay T-mobile for the end user service. T-mobile has ~100M customers so 0th oder that's only $10/year/customer (which obviously is pretty tenable if it just gets baked into everyone's plans), but since service quality is inversely proportional to the number of users, giving everyone access opens up a strong potential for
really shitty service, especially in places you're most likely to go off grid (because those places are the same places other people are most likely to go--service quality is always going to come down to user density, just like Starlink). If the pricing instead becomes opt-in (monthly/per-use/day-pass/whatever) service will be way way better but also could get pretty steep.
Another big unknown is how Apple's existing service will impact the take on an opt-in scenario. US phones are basically evenly split between iOS and Android; even if we account for TM's lower-tier MNO status it's probably fair to say at least 1/3 of the customers are on iPhones. Anyone buying a new iPhone gets apple's satellite service for free (at least for some time--two years I think, though its hard to imagine ever having to pay for a 911 service) and so those folks will have to pay a TM upcharge to get [additional] satellite service to what they already have. Is a bit of a human nature thought experiment to tease out how many people will want to pay extra vs fall back to "Apple keeps me safe, I can wait to text until I get there".
Then there's the
other MNO factor--I don't know what the TM/SX agreement actually says, but I assume its very much an SLA (vs TM procuring Capex) and, if there's any kind of exclusivity in it, it would only be for a short time. So..SX could (and I'm sure are keen to) sign similar SLAs with A/V and further clog up the network. More money for SX, lower level of service for all users.
So bottom line, any service is better than no service, but meter your expectations on "service".
