Phones will disconnect from a cell tower when they’re more than 21 miles (35 kilometers) away, and the satellites flying overhead will be 310 miles (500 kilometers) away.īut the software that UbiquitiLink has developed basically overrides these functions in a standard cellphone, making the device think that the satellite is stable and only 12 miles (20 kilometers) away. The satellite is also a lot farther away than a cell tower should be. The device will notice that the object is moving through the sky, which isn’t ideal for a good connection. This was tricky, says Miller, because a mobile phone doesn’t really want to connect with a satellite. First, the team says it has taken the standard software that ground cell towers use to connect to phones and put it into their satellites with modifications to link up to phones on the ground whenever there isn’t a ground cell tower nearby. The Ubiquitlink team claims to have made some major breakthroughs that will make this concept possible. “I looked down, and I go, ‘why not?’” A cell tower in the UK Photo by Matthew Horwood/Getty Images Decker then posed the question of whether or not a satellite could connect directly to a phone. Many of the aid workers were using satellite terminals to send messages through their phones, which quickly ate up data. Miller says he first came up with the idea along with his co-founder, Margo Deckard, after doing some analysis for nonprofits responding to the Ebola crisis in Africa. “And our data suggests that the people in rural or remote areas are willing to switch based on if they had our service or not.” “There’s peace of mind and safety here of being able to be connected all the time,” he says. And Miller is confident people will want the option.
Sending a satellite into a black hole how to#
UbiquitiLink plans to offer this capability to mobile network operators, and then these companies can decide how to distribute it to the consumer - perhaps for an extra fee or baked into an existing deal. That means all of the heavy lifting would be left to a person’s cell service provider, not the cellphone user. To close those gaps, UbiquitiLink says it has developed a way to trick any person’s phone into connecting with an overhead satellite whenever the device is out of range of a cell tower. “It’s filling in the gaps - the black spots all over the world,” says Miller, who estimates that an average of 750 million cellphone users don’t have connectivity at any given time. Instead, the idea behind UbiquitiLink is to provide additional cell coverage to regions outside of the range of conventional towers, such as rural or hard-to-reach areas. No matter what, Earth-based cell towers will provide faster coverage than cell service from space, says Miller. The objective isn’t to completely replace the need for cell towers on the ground, though. “We’re going to turn all their phones into satellite phones.” “There are 5.2 billion phone users on the planet,” Charles Miller, co-founder and CEO of UbiquitiLink, tells The Verge. Instead, the company is solely focused on cellphone service, with the goal of placing small satellites into orbit that any mobile phone can connect to seamlessly, without any changes being made to the phones themselves. But unlike many of these other proposed satellite projects - such as those of SpaceX, OneWeb, or Amazon - UbiquitiLink is not hoping to beam specialized internet connections from space. The package is the product of a startup called UbiquitiLink, the latest company to propose putting a mega-constellation of satellites into low orbit above Earth. If it works, the instrument could be a precursor to a giant constellation of thousands of mini-satellites that function as cell towers circulating all over the globe.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched to the International Space Station last week carried a tiny package that could eventually lead to the smartphone you have in your pocket getting cell service from space.