Comment by pasquino | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pasquino | Hacker News Reader

Why you should if you don't have to ? Satellite phones are a thing at least since the 90s, but nowadays you prefer some kind of communication via Internet, possibly using wifi. Ok, emergency call, place out the civilisation, but those are same use case present 30 years ago. If you don't have to you want to use real cell towers or wifi. Also I think that to cover the communication needs of a single western rich country they have to increase the number of satellite drastically, with lot of side effects. So really satellites aren't new cell towers. Besides, is that type of infrastructure so profitable to justify its creation ? I want to say, if I wasn't able to do an emergency call the problem was dead battery, not absence of signal, in other cases I use the ol' dirty Marconi's wireless telegraph: the radio. Obviously , if I have a way to send sms from desert place, it's a "nice to have feature" not a necessity for the majority of us, so, again , how the company want to monetise from the infrastructure that is greatly expensive ?

I essentially pay a bunch of money to garmin so i can text people while camping and offroading and send tiny amounts of data to update my position on a map.

I got a iPhone 14 for a backup satellite sos method.

In Canada there are 100s of km of roads between towns with zero cellphone service, often for hours at a time. Having space based communication in a cellphone to fall back on would be extreme valuable and life saving to many. I know I already pay a bundle for it and many of my outdoorsy friends do the same. I can be driving to a friends house a few hours away and be out of signal for half of it, being able to call for help if I encounter or get into an accident is pretty important and building cell towers would be far more expensive then some satellites

> and building cell towers would be far more expensive then some satellites

Historic.

if by historic you think this statement is somehow extremely wrong, i don't think you realize how big canada is, how many cell towers it takes to get good coverages in mountainous areas, and how many small communities exist in the middle of nowhere and how remote they are - many of these towns don't even have cell coverage.

Cell coverage is simply is never going to happen for these areas and the roads to get to them as the telecommunication company will never recoup their costs.

No, the opposite - historic because it's true.

> send tiny amounts of data to update my position on a map

If you could clarify- is this data like mobile data/internet, or data in a literal sense? Because if you’re SMSing your GPS coordinates to a friend’s phone you could stick to only SMS.

I'm not sure, its all hidden behind the garmin software but i presume its just data (and the SMS function is also just using data and the backend handles SMS)

you get a link you can share with people that brings up a map showing your location & track

Thanks!

Totally agree with your point of view.

Another thing to consider is how much the bands dedicated to cell phones are already saturated in dense urban environments. I don't see how a few thousands satellites would be able to scale if they were to replace our actual cell towers (some of them consisting of local cells on utility poles, etc.).

And also, satellites dedicated to search and rescue to locate emergency beacons already exist, and you don't need many of them to cover the whole planet.

> Another thing to consider is how much the bands dedicated to cell phones are already saturated in dense urban environments.

That's what 5G is supposed to be for. In dense areas, there are supposed to be a large number of tiny cells operating in the 5GHz-6GHz range. The main application for this is stadiums, so the fans can be getting video on their phone while watching, or not watching, the dame. Most of the NFL stadiums now have this.

Other parts of cities, not so much yet.

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