T-Mobile to tap Elon Musk’s satellites for new remote phone service in the US

T-Mobile US Inc. is partnering with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to offer wireless phone service in remote parts of the US where coverage is spotty. T-Mobile and SpaceX held an announcement event at Starbase situated in Boca China, Texas. In this unexpected event, the organizations announced a vision for the future where dead zones would successfully be eliminated by utilizing SpaceX’s Starlink satellites to provide backup coverage in areas where there’s generally no terrestrial cellular coverage. Areas like national parks, remote locations in the US, or out in the ocean.

T-Mobile to tap Elon Musk’s satellites

Elon Musk’s SpaceX and T-Mobile are teaming up to offer mobile clients phone service by means of Starlink satellites, the organizations announced on Thursday.

The Livestream began with a video show of folks who live, work, and play in the most remote areas of the United States. For these individuals, not having a cell signal could mean the contrast between life and death in crisis circumstances.

Elon Musk and T-Mobile Chief Executive Officer Mike Sievert announced the partnership at an event Thursday night at SpaceX’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas. The service will launch the following year and work with existing phones free of charge on the organization’s most famous plans, carried out in stages, Sievert said. Clients on lower-priced plans might pay an additional charge.

Elon Musk said the service, which leverages SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, ought to have the option to deal with messages, images, and potentially little video files, yet warned that transmissions might require as long as half an hour early in the roll-out. Voice capabilities will come later.

SpaceX is designing extraordinary antennae that will be appended to the organization’s second-generation internet satellites to permit T-Mobile clients to the interface, he said. The V2 satellites will launch on SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which is still being developed.

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Elon Musk said the satellite-based service will work in any event, during hurricanes and natural disasters that take out conventional cell phone towers. He said it will eventually save the existence of individuals harmed or abandoned in remote parts of the world.

The billionaire added that SpaceX is offering an “open invitation” to different transporters to work with Starlink. The service may at last work in space.

“It is about solving the biggest pain point in the over-40-year history of our industry,” T-mobile CEO Mike Sievert explains. “This partnership has a vision that is the end of mobile dead zones”. According to the CEO, there are in excess of 500,000 square miles of revealed American soil. Also, the thought painted in the Livestream show is one where individuals could never have to stress over losing a signal during a crisis.

Sievert claims that as long as you have an unmistakable perspective on the sky, you will be connected with T-Mobile’s network on your smartphone. T-Mobile will commit a cut of its mid-band PCS smartphone to incorporate with Starlink satellites that will launch into space one year from now. Smartphones will get a signal whether they are in a pocket in a car.

“We’d love to have T-Mobile on Mars,” he said.

Elon Musk later tweeted the service will be added to Tesla Inc. vehicles to permit drivers to settle on crisis calls and texts.

The initial business model of SpaceX’s Starlink division was to give broadband internet service to homes, especially in rural areas not served via landline suppliers. The organization has a fleet of around 2,800 satellites in a low-Earth orbit which it’s launched over the most recent couple of years.

T-Mobile is building one of the nation’s biggest 5G networks to give quicker internet connections to phones and homes.

Their move rivals fellow billionaire Amazon.com Inc’s. Jeff Bezos’ low-Earth orbit satellite subsidiary Kuiper Systems LLC, announced a comparable agreement with Verizon Communications Inc. last year. Amazon.com’s Project Kuiper made one of the biggest launch deals ever in April to send in excess of 3,000 satellites into space.

SpaceX will start conveying second-generation Starlink satellites fitted with phased array antennas that will actually want to compensate orbit speeds to give a connection. “I hope the public understands the magnitude of the announcement”, Elon Musk said on stage.

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Satellites will emulate a “cell” on earth that will actually want to give speeds of up to 2 Mbps. Elon Musk says this ought to be sufficient to deal with 1000-2000 concurrent voice calls or hundreds of thousands of messages. The service will initially uphold sending and getting messages and there are plans to ultimately have the option to deal with voice and data.

Elon Musk clarified on stage that these satellites are not planned to supplant customary towers, but rather give a redundant organization that could fill in the blank zones and possibly gives a temporary network during a natural disaster when cell towers go offline.

You will actually want to get a signal on your current smartphone, so long as it can get T-Mobile’s mid-band PCS spectrum (band n41 on 2.5GHz). Satellites will be outfitted with equipment that can connect with your smartphone with no extra hardware.

The satellite service will go online for a beta test later in 2023 with a public launch possible for 2024. T-Mobile’s “most popular” plans (Likely T-Mobile’s Magenta MAX) will be qualified to get to the Starlink connection for no extra charge while clients on less expensive plans can pay an additional charge for access.

In front of an audience, Elon Musk extended an open invitation to global wireless carriers. “Please get in touch with us and we’d love to partner with you and enable this globally.” Participating transporters could sort out a deal to give mutual roaming services to their subscribers traveling out to the US and T-Mobile clients traveling abroad, facilitated through a simulated cellular antenna in space.

On Thursday, Starlink costs dropped for certain clients in the UK, Mexico, Germany, and Netherlands