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Comment by rfarley04 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who splits their time between Thailand and the US, I cannot wait for satellite phones to become commercially viable.

Everyone in Thailand uses LINE for (data) messaging and calls. Everyone in the US uses (cell) SMS and calls. Having just a US number with satellite data would give me total coverage

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Unfortunately because of spectrum rules it’s unlikely that cell plans will work outside of the regulatory coverage region.

The bandwidth limitations mean it won’t be useful in populated areas. This is for when you’re out camping and there are five people on the network per square mile.

This use case is already being solved in the boring way. T-Mobile and Google Fi offer free global data roaming. All other carriers have been pressured to lower roaming prices on their networks in recent years. There is more and more free wifi coverage available everywhere (and phones now have auto connect capability). People are switching away from SMS to other apps. This is really not a problem that needs an expensive satellite connection to solve anymore.

Unfortunately for actual nomads Google Fi doesn't work. After 3 months outside the US they shut down your service.

Just pop your SIM card into a serial interface attached over the internet to a US-based phone’s SIM card slot every night (or one night a week?)

Surely they won’t notice you teleporting around?

Hopefully the phone doesn’t mind the latency when talking to its SIM that’s supposed to be 3cm away.

All the thungs you named do not exist in remote areas and where they do exist they disappear as soon as a natural disaster like an earthquake happens.

being able to use SMS in a disaster area is a big deal.

> people are switching from sms

Not my experience at all. I use SMS more now than I did a few years ago. The aggregate hardly matters when it comes to individual choices.

> T-mobile and Google Fi > free wifi coverage.

Ha! Where do you live? This doesn’t hold up to any place I’ve been that isn’t the flatlands. Cell coverage sucks any place with real terrain.

I live in California within 25 minutes of a major metro, but in the hills. I only get one provider, Verizon, at my house, and only a few bars of LTE, no 5g. Any other provider gets no service at all. There is no place with free wifi within a 5 minute drive that I know of.

Pretty sure free roaming is still very much a promotional offer and a loss leader, it's not meant to be used all the time: most carriers either limit the amount of time you can roam and/or implement separate data caps (often much lower than the main one).

https://www.airalo.com/

Bandwidth is very hit and miss on these. I've tried such a service very recently and in the evening in the middle of Barcelona it was unusable with very sporadic bits of high-latency (+100ms ping) connectivity. Frankly I should chargeback the payment out of principle to discourage selling broken products/services.

Agree on Airalo. I had better luck with Dent.

Why not just get a US VoIP number like Google voice?

GV requires an active and linked landline or mobile number to be functionally useful and some major services will prevent you from registering a VoIP number (eg: banking).

False. It's nice of you to be overconfident, though

eg: LINE bars the use of GV numbers as does Discord. It used to be possible in GV's early years to make a call from your American GV number while in another country but seems to be no longer the case.

Or maybe I'm made a hasty generalization. I've used my GV number for years, including with line, and I still make calls from wherever with it, but maybe that's because of its age and that it was ported from a regular cell

You already should have "total coverage" if you're using Wi-Fi calling, which contrary to its name also supports texting.

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