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They’re not wrong about L-band modems. Current mobile phones do have L-band modems, but they are for receiving GPS signals and don’t transmit.
So a transmitter is mod, and a receiver is dem? That’s what they told me too, but then how come the word is modem and not moddem? It can’t be mo for transmitter and dem for receiver, because there is an equal amount of both. And no, you can’t have a shared “d” letter, because that makes splitting the word impossible.

So a transmitter is mod, and a receiver is dem? That’s what they told me too, but then how come the word is modem and not moddem?
You’re not allowed to mod ‘dem. It violates the warranty.
Right to repair says F that.

You’re not allowed to mod ‘dem. It violates the warranty.
Not quite. You just gotta know when to mod’dem, know when to code’em, know when to GPS, know when to 5G…
Statement from Iridium: “The companies successfully developed and demonstrated the technology .. smartphone manufacturers have not included the technology in their devices”
Then the summary says: “the statement from Iridium suggests the Snapdragon Satellite platform suffered from technical issues, or perhaps failed to attract interest from smartphone vendors.”
caveat: the logic error was too much for my neural net allocation so i couldn’t rtfa.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: They don’t have many customers, so to cover costs they have to charge more per customer. The high price tag means they have fewer customers.
Starlink has higher operation costs (the individual satellites are cheaper, but there are more of them and they have to be replaced more often), but also deeper pockets. And where Iridium has private customers – like shipping companies, and research stations in Antarctica -, Starlink has the Pentagon and the Ukrainian army.
That doesn’t make any sense. SpaceX LTE will still require a special subscription with your cell provider for it to work. If Iridium wants to also slice off some bandwidth using a special chipset / special modem, they should do it if they don’t want to remain dinosaurs not selling bandwidth in that space. This just tells me that Iridium are greedy bastards. (Well, who didn’t know that already with satellite phone calls through them costing $5/min or whatnot.) Maybe this is more about Iridium not cutting int
It was rather obvious that you can’t get standard mobile phones to engage in two-way communications with satellites. And that there isn’t a big market for making that happen.
Somebody made money off this, and it wasn’t made honestly.
It was rather obvious that you can’t get standard mobile phones to engage in two-way communications with satellites.
Guess Apple didn’t get that memo. Of course, the Apple satellite SOS mechanism is very low bandwidth. Still, it is 2 way, you can send an emergency text message via satellite.
And it costs Apple a pretty penny, but with their margins it don’t matter.
And it costs Apple a pretty penny, but with their margins it don’t matter.
But given the press releases it generates, it likely generates far more good will that you really cannot buy.
I mean, you get stories like someone in a crashed vehicle getting rescued because their phone could send an emergency satellite message out. Or when Maui was burning, how the two-way messaging feature rescued a family that was trapped.
You really cannot buy that kind of press release and good news story – same reason we had a bu
Only for Apple, the incentive and income structure for Android just isn’t there for Google to absorb the costs … which is why an Apple monopoly is almost inevitable.
I’m not sure I would find pleas of poverty from Google to be credible.
But the costs could be shared between Google and the handset manufacturers. It’s the Telcos that would make no $ on the deal, and that’s probably the dealbreaker.

It was rather obvious that you can’t get standard mobile phones to engage in two-way communications with satellites.
Actually, the new second-generation SpaceX Starlink satellites are expected to do just that. T-Mobile has already announced a partnership with them in the U.S., and it won’t require any special hardware.
The reason Qualcomm’s tech was dead on arrival was that you had to add some additional RF hardware, and nobody was willing to increase their devices’ BOM cost if SpaceX could do the same thing with stock phone hardware within a couple of years.
I doubt either will work inside a building, so there’s that. A L-band transmitter in a cell phone is a joke.
This is an example of extremely minimized L-band kit, but still requires you to point it outside at the ecliptic. [wikipedia.org]

I doubt either will work inside a building, so there’s that.
Not the target market.
This is about going out for a hike and getting lost and being an idiot, then being saved. Not about allowing soccer moms more coverage. You can already provide all the needed coverage by just installing more cell towers. It isn’t profitable enough to install a cell tower every 10 miles in the wilderness. Satellite makes more sense for that.

This is about going out for a hike and getting lost and being an idiot, then being saved.
Just to be pedantic here, people don’t necessarily have to be idiots to need rescuing. Car accidents can happen anywhere at any time. People can slip and fall and be injured too badly to make it back to the road. And so on. But yes, at least the current generation is intended primarily for emergency use.

Not about allowing soccer moms more coverage. You can already provide all the needed coverage by just installing more cell towers. It isn’t profitable enough to install a cell tower every 10 miles in the wilderness. Satellite makes more sense for that.
Also, it isn’t feasible to install a cell tower in some places, such as mountainous terrain. You could end up needing a tower every few hundred feet to get full coverage in some places, and although the
The technology works fine, the business case doesn’t. This was a desperate attempt to maintain feature parity with Apple, but at the end of the day the profit just wasn’t there because Android phones don’t have the margins of Apple and users won’t pay a subscription either.
So you can get it for “free” with Apple or not at all with Android … another brick in the wall.
The inability of Android to deliver a true high end experience is going to be the slow death of it.
Android and ChromeOS need to be split off from advertising into a new company and make all their money from licensing and the store. Android licensing needs to forbid manufacturer skinning and bloatware with the new company handling all updates including for carrier (hardware manufacturers need to do just the hardware, same as Chromebook). They needed to do this 5 years ago.
The economic framework for Android i
The A in Alphabet Inc is for Android.
Android is GPL, which explicitly forbids the publisher from adding restrictions to the licence. And while Google does manufacture hardware – the Pixel line of phones -, the majority of Android phones are by licencees like Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi. There are also alternatives like the Freephone. There are Android phones that are designed to surpass iPhones in every technical way at half the price.
ChromeOS is something completely different. Much like how iOS is noth
I doubt they have accepted much outside source code into Android, they can change the license on their own code. They don’t need to though.
Play store already puts restrictions on the Android implementation, what I’m suggesting is that those restrictions should be just as strong as Chromebook. Chromebook hardware is controlled and supported by Google, even when third parties manufacture it … the same should be true for Play store Android phones. Then Play store Android phones would be just as consistent as
Officially, they are already separate companies, all owned by Alphabet. But everybody knows it is really Google.
Google’s approach to hardware is like Microsoft’s approach to hardware: They’ll do it, if only to prove that it can be done and as reference to prove that it was the licencees who borked it.
The Iridium deal was not with Google anyway, it was with Qualcomm. Qualcomm manufacture chips for Android phones. They are not the only manufacturer of chips for Android phones, and Android phones are not th
You make the same mistake Microsoft and Valve made too, they see no middle ground between complete vertical integration and letting the hardware manufacturers just combine parts almost however they wish.
Google already has that middle ground, Chromebooks. The same development model should be used for phones (and Windows 365 PCs and Steam PCs).
I’d pay for the cost in my Android phone, even if it was a few hundred dollars, if I was lost in the forest injured, and there were no other options. (If the satellite modem was waiting dormant until needed.) Hell, search and rescue might be willing to eat the cost if it means saving a human and not a corpse recovery.
Here’s the thing: Iridium is expensive as fuck.
Apple went with Globalstar, a satellite network that has spottier coverage: it doesn’t work most places of the world, and even where it does work it requires you to wait for a satellite and aim your phone. However, it’s cheaper.
Iridium is different. It works over most of the globe, it is reliable under dense coverage, it is fast, and in most cases doesn’t require any effort from the user. And you pay for it.
Samsung isn’t going to be able to bring out a flagship
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