The end of the white spots
The plans were presented by SpaceX boss Elon Musk and T-Mobile boss Mike Sievert in front of three huge rockets on the SpaceX site in Boca Chica (Texas). They pointed out that it has proven to be particularly difficult for the telecoms industry to provide mobile communications to remote areas. Well over a million square kilometers, or more than 20 percent of the land area of the United States are not covered, the companies explain. The Starlink satellites will soon step in here. The managers also directly invited other providers to participate. The aim is to end white spots.
However, while a special antenna is required to connect to the satellites already circling in space, conventional smartphones should be able to connect directly to the planned 2nd generation satellites. As soon as connections to a radio tower cannot be established, this should also happen as a kind of fallback level – all that is required is an unobscured view of the sky. No extra costs are planned for most of the existing mobile phone contracts. Initially, data rates of 2 to 4 Mbit/s should be achieved, so it’s not about replacing mobile broadband Internet. However, Sievert assured that one would work on handling more data-intensive services via Starlink.
A technical challenge
The basis for the cooperation are the next generation Starlink satellites. With a weight of 1.25 tons, they are more than four times as heavy as those previously used and are also much longer. The Falcon rockets currently used to build the satellite constellation cannot take them into space; the giant Starship rocket is needed for this. It has never started, the maiden flight had recently been delayed further and further. Musk was once again confident that the rocket will soon be operational. By the end of 2023, there should be enough new Starlink satellites in space for a beta test of the offer called “Coverage Above and Beyond” to be able to start.
SpaceX has been building Starlink since 2019, and well over 2000 active satellites are currently connecting large parts of North America, Europe and parts of South America and Australia. With a total of more than 30,000 satellites, regions that cannot be connected economically using conventional technology are to be given fast Internet access. Starlink is the first and by far the most advanced project to build a so-called megaconstellation; there are other plans for alternative offers, such as from OneWeb or Amazon with the Project Kuiper. Shortly before the presentation of the cooperation with T-Mobile US, Starlink reduced prices almost everywhere in the middle of the week, sometimes quite significantly.
