SpaceX to offer Starlink for cell phones
SpaceX has now announced that its Starlink internet service will soon be available for cell phones that are already in use, allowing them access to service even in places where no cell towers exist.
Direct to Cell works with existing LTE phones wherever you can see the sky. No changes to hardware, firmware, or special apps are required, providing seamless access to text, voice, and data.
First Starlink will only provide text service in 2024, and then expand to voice and data in 2025.
This capability means that SpaceX will not only be in direct competition with AST SpaceMobile, which recently launched a satellite to test similar capabilities, it will be far ahead of it in that competition. In fact, SpaceX is setting Starlink up as the go-to company for all smartphones and home internet services. By 2025 you will not need any other provider to have phone and internet service globally.
No wonder private investment firms have been willing to invest almost $11 billion in the company. They see big profits on the horizon.
That our federal government dislikes this fact, and is doing everything it can to crush Elon Musk and the company, tells us much about government itself. It isn’t interested in promoting human success. Instead, its instinct is to squelch it.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
SpaceX has now announced that its Starlink internet service will soon be available for cell phones that are already in use, allowing them access to service even in places where no cell towers exist.
Direct to Cell works with existing LTE phones wherever you can see the sky. No changes to hardware, firmware, or special apps are required, providing seamless access to text, voice, and data.
First Starlink will only provide text service in 2024, and then expand to voice and data in 2025.
This capability means that SpaceX will not only be in direct competition with AST SpaceMobile, which recently launched a satellite to test similar capabilities, it will be far ahead of it in that competition. In fact, SpaceX is setting Starlink up as the go-to company for all smartphones and home internet services. By 2025 you will not need any other provider to have phone and internet service globally.
No wonder private investment firms have been willing to invest almost $11 billion in the company. They see big profits on the horizon.
That our federal government dislikes this fact, and is doing everything it can to crush Elon Musk and the company, tells us much about government itself. It isn’t interested in promoting human success. Instead, its instinct is to squelch it.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
the old companies are lobbying (paying off) the politicians to slow down Elon on every front.
The government doesn’t care about anything but cash. Its not personal. The idiots who work for the government might take things personal but the organization doesn’t care a bit.
All these capabilities from his satellites was predicted by Musk years ago.
Put a Starlink on cell towers.
I thought it would take Bluewalker for direct-to-device
I define The Deep State as simply The Federal Bureaucracy within the executive branch. I could easily be convinced to include an awful lot of “industry” the uses Lobbyists to thwart competition through regulation.
That said The Deep State has a problem. It is the most horrible problem that ALL governments have always faced. In very broad and sweeping terms all human government came into existence to protect a group of people from outside threat to their resources to actually just live. This began with large scale agriculture. Human Societies began to form governments as they became dependent on fixed geophysical locations at which they grew their FOOD.
So,… stability and protection. Stability to move and trade the FOOD for Services. Protection to keep bad people from interfereing. But every single government ever formed had this problem. Individuals acting, seemingly at random, who might interfere with this. Soon it was discovered that many more threats to the “stability” part of the problem were LOCAL to the Society itself.
Thus controlling the seemingly random acts of Individuals became a focus for efforts to maintain “stability” or as we sometimes call it now, “Order”. Liberty is the name for Individuals acting randomly in their own interests, ostensibly limited by their own good sense.
The Deep State has completely abandon all appreciation of Liberty as I just described it. Since the advent of Socialism and Communism methods for control have been discovered that are nearly perfect in application and efficiency.
Control the Food Supply …. FDA does that
Control the perception of what is proper to eat and not proper to eat…. FDA again
Control the ability of Individuals to resist intrusions by force and use a arms… ATF handles that
Control the perception of what constitutes Good Health. …. CDC and FDA handle this.
Control the availability of Health Care. This is the heart of Medicare, Medicaid and Obama Care.. Currently all hospitals operating costs and profits depend on payments made to them by insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicade. Private Insurance companies have almost universally adopted the standards of Medicaire in evaluating what they will and will NOT pay for. The actual patient is simply an appendage which generates the income provided by The Deep State or Insurance companies that adhere to the standards of The Deep State.
Control Food and Health availability to The People and Control of The People simply falls into place with little or no effort at all. At that point anything The State merely “says is so” will be accepted as a “revealed truth” comparable to an Edict From God.
We are there now. The COVID – 19 Government induced PANIC just proved that it’s all in place and now a matter of established policy and fact. Unless you are willing for forgoe any kind of Hospital Oriented health care, AND you can prepare your own foods outside the realm of FDA regulation, i.e. delicate processes like pickling foods, and curing Meats for preservation, you are completely subject to their whims and have no Liberty left at all.
That is no longer “a danger imminent”. The COVID Panic proved that it is already here, already a policy and practice in use and institutionalized already. Any attempt, in WORD or DEED, will absolutely viewed as insurrection and in many cases now out-and-out treason,
The Individual will be pursued, hounded, persecuted and LEGALLY PUNISHED for any such activity.
Elon Musk will be lucky to survive all this. I am hoping to go with STARLINK. I am HOPING that it will still be around in 2025 when the full services are projected to be available.
I fear the worst. Musk will die under mysterious circumstances, Starlink will be regulated out of exixtence, Liberty will continue to be quashed and anyone who utters the word Liberty will be branded a “RADICAL EXTREEMIST, subject to punishment as a domestic terrorist, or insurrectionist.
It is most likely already way too late to think in terms of a political resolution to this mess. We have long passed the point of “submit or die”.
WACO should have taught us that. It didn’t.
Years ago I thought StarLink should be all I need. I tried to use it. But even if it had worked at my home (it didn’t work because of surrounding steep hills and trees) it was – and still is – twice as expensive and much slower than AT&T fiber service. Starlink upload speed (at twice the price of AT&T) is 10% & download 30% of AT&T speed.
But if I move to the middle of the desert, I’m sure StarLink will be awesome there.
I’m on a rural road where we don’t even have copper twisted pair voice only phone lines, let alone ISDN, DSL cable, or fiber. It requires a “dish” on the roof to get either a fixed wireless (cell-phone like) connection or a link to HughesNet, ViaSat, or DirectTV. Into this wasteland strode Starlink.
Kinda reminds me of K-Mart killing/eating Wards, Sears, Kress and Woolworth. The wheel turns.