Call from the heavens – A new firm says it can link satellites to ordinary smartphones

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Satellite constellations, like those being built by SpaceX, OneWeb and Amazon, will provide broadband access anywhere on the planet, but will not talk directly to existing telephone handsets (they will instead require small receiving stations on the ground, to act as gateways).
By contrast Abel Avellan, the founder of an American firm called AST & Science, claims to have invented a way to provide the best of both worlds: satellite connectivity that works anywhere on the planet and yet is accessible directly, via existing handsets.
Mr Avellan, a veteran of the satellite industry, says he has spent years devising a way to get satellites to talk directly to ordinary phones.
The result is an unusually large satellite that is capable of picking up a handset’s feeble signal, and also of broadcasting directly back to that handset.
The satellite acts as a relay between the handset and existing antennas on the ground that are connected to cellular networks.
Mr Avellan says this approach can work with 2 G , 3 G , 4 G and 5 G networks, providing access in remote areas of land that currently have no coverage, and also on planes and at sea.
SpaceMobile will, he says, launch a network of “a few hundred” satellites to provide global coverage.
Last April, rather than launching a prototype of one of its large satellites, it kept the prototype on the ground and instead launched a tiny satellite to create what was, in effect, an orbiting handset.
Even though the positions of relay and handset were thus reversed, their relative motions were the same as they would have been if the satellite had been in space and the handset on the ground.
One industry insider, who has previously been involved with the SpaceX and OneWeb satellite projects, says getting handsets to talk directly to satellites means overcoming a huge number of problems relating to power requirements, propagation delay, allocation of frequency bands, interference and cross-border regulation

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