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Comment by CraigJPerry | Hacker News Reader

I’d love to learn more about the RF side of this. In their marketing demo they showed that in order to avoid needing a traditional antenna, the user will be guided to point the phone at a satellite during the few minutes required for transmission.

I’d love to know what the antenna arrangement is. I’d have guessed something like a log periodic laid out on the inside of the rear case.

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Would be also interesting to see how this solution compares to the Chinese BeiDou based network that Huawei is using. Is this similar a standard? Meaning that iPhone at one point would support BeiDou or is it completely different?

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/6/23339717/huawei-mate-50-pr...

The first phone maker to add satellite texting to its devices is... Huawei

Huawei has announced the Mate 50 series, a day ahead of Apple’s September event and with a feature that the iPhone 14 is expected to offer: the ability to send texts via satellite communication. The Mate 50 and Mate 50 Pro will be able to send short texts and utilize navigation thanks to China’s global BeiDou satellite network, allowing for communication in areas without cellular signal.

I think they are completely different.

It seems Apple uses the GlobalStar LEO satllites for these communication.[0]

Huawei is using BeiDou[1], which is the navigation satellite system. BeiDou is something just like GPS, but has the capability to send short text message. Huawei is using that function for SOS meesage.

Basically you can expect wherever you can receive navigation signals, you can send your SOS message.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-picks-globalstar-sa...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou

>The first phone maker to add satellite texting to its devices is... Huawei

Which will more likely be used as a tool to allow the supreme leaders to invade your privacy even more.

Why would Biden care about my location?

Biden barely knows his own location anyway

They could do some cool 1-way Forward Error Correctioned broadcasts with that. “Point your phone in the sky here for your daily news updates” kinda thing. Could be localized with spot beams in a future iteration.

Or get a fancy holder and hold in place for an hour to get X minutes of video updates.

Or overnight for the latest AppleTV banger.

Basically a mini-direcTV.

But it's for sending messages

Correct, and nothing stops Apple from reversing that connection and sending messages to users

Friend of a friend works the satellite trucks for onsite broadcasting at sports events. He told me once that he phones the satellite operators and they coordinate to make sure the beams are aligned as tightly as possible to reduce the power loading on the satellite. I’m guessing there’s probably a similar constraint here — I don’t think (pure conjecture) it’s feasible to have a tonne of iPhones (and let’s be honest, they’re everywhere) hanging off satellites.

The bandwidth is far too low for that.

Wonder if Apple is using a phase array like starlink

How do you think WiFi 6E works?

As well as any other WiFi I imagine. So I take it the answer to GP is "Yes, probably."

Earlier versions didn’t have MIMO (beam shaping). Iirc ac was the first version of Wi-Fi to support it.

MIMO is not beamforming. 802.11n uses MIMO, 802.11ac introduced beamforming officially, there were some nonstandard vendor implementations in 802.11n.

>How do you think WiFi 6E works?

iPhone 14 doesn't have WiFi 6E on any model.

https://www.apple.com/iphone-14-pro/specs/

https://www.apple.com/iphone-14/specs/

Like wifi 6, but with more Hz

They wouldn't need to for very low bandwidth, which is what this service is.

If they ever try to offer Starlink-level speed it'll be a different story. That will require a Starlink-sized external antenna.

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