If I’m reading this filing right, Apple have committed to using 85% of Globalstars satellite network capacity for the new emergency messaging feature. It’s seems astonishing to me that they would be using this much bandwidth for that emergency feature, and (at least initially) only on a small portion of iPhones.
My only thinking is that they may be planning to make the satellite network available to none emergency messaging too, and that’s what’s covered in this filing.
It isn't just used for the emergency feature, it is also used for the "Find My" network. I suspect more traffic will come from "Find My" than from the emergency feature.
It wasn't omitted. It was covered in the keynote. It's also on their website:
Let friends know how remote you go.
If you’re on an adventure without cell service,
you can now use Find My to share your location
via satellite so friends and family know where you are.
Apple's always-on pingback no matter where you go in the globe, even if you disable cell networks. I do believe they care about privacy, though if you look at features like this it's easy to see that they can be worse than Google if they wanted.
Except this (currently) requires users to point their phone at a satellite so it can connect and transmit, with clear line of site of the sky. It seems it will be more likely something you'd do when you get to your "campsite" and want friends/family to know where you are located.
edit: I didn't realize this will apparently be required due to the antenna design in the iPhone, seems very cumbersome, you can't easily see where the satellites are...
You don't really need to point it, at least with my inreach if its near the top of my pack and I'm not in a canyon or something I can get a message out.
> you can't easily see where the satellites are...
Which is why when you're using it they guide you on how to orient the phone (per their released info so far, we'll have actual user reports in a few weeks).
Of course if you don’t trust that, you shouldn’t be buying an Apple product anyways. They could ship an always on microphone streaming to their servers if they wanted to. But we trust that they won’t.
Edward J. Snowden insisted that a group of lawyers advising him in the Chinese territory “hide their cellphones in the refrigerator of the home where he was staying, to block any eavesdropping,”
I had the (dumb) idea of putting an AirTag in the family car, with the idea of being able to get a rough idea of where it is parked without depending on the terrible manf provided app. Every time my partner would drive the car it would ping away for a good 2-3 minutes due to the safety notifications. We're all part of the same family account, I don't really understand why it isn't an option to just ignore it.
> We're all part of the same family account, I don't really understand why it isn't an option to just ignore it.
Because there are way too many spouses who go to as absurd lengths as setting private investigators on their partners. Stalking is just as much a concern inside families as it is for everyday persons - I might be tempted to say that the impact is worse given the potential for domestic violence. Or just imagine fundamentalist parents tracking their children to Planned Parenthood, a known LGBT-friendly place or whatever.
Ideally, there would be laws and regulations on trackers - and not just hardware-ones like the AirTags, but also software-based ones - that mandate features to prevent abuse, but sadly politicians haven't caught up on tech developments yet.
That still doesn't explain why it's not an option _for nikdoof's partner_ to choose to disable notifications from that particular AirPod. It makes total sense why nikdoof shouldn't be able to disable it for their partner.
Wait, I might not be understanding the threat model here. The situation I imagined was: persons A and B are spouses, A wants to track B, so since A and B are in a family unit, A would want to disable the "You're being followed" alert for B without B knowing.
If A had to coerce B to turn of the alert, then the alert would have already served its purpose to tell B that they're being tracked by A. Moreover, there should still be some interface which B can use to figure out which AirTag is following them, so person B would 1) know that A is tracking them in general, and 2) have the ability to check whether A is tracking them in the moment.
Please explain what additional information or utility the continued notification is giving person B in this moment, or if my understanding of the hypothetical is wrong.
The threat model is that B has no way of knowing if she is actually being tracked (or if she could potentially be), or if A has just made empty threats. By coercion - or by manipulating the setting on his own on B's phone without A knowing -, A could prevent her from finding out that she could be tracked by someone.
Apple however can't differentiate between someone wishing to track their dog and someone wishing to track their spouse - at that point basic ethics come to play. It's bad enough that AirTags even exist, the absurd amount of stalking cases proves it, but now Apple is all but forced to rein the bullshit in.
Its amazing to me how easily people are willing to give Apple their data compared to Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Specially looking at how Apple was to willing to put its servers in countries that want control of the data. I think people seem to forget the privacy fight was not about privacy from advertisers but from government over reach. People are looking at Google for building skynet but Apple seems to be successfully building it and people are enthusiastically adopting it.
Apple has a really strong track record of resisting Government intrusion, within the bounds of the law, not selling customer data to third parties, and holding app developers to account for the privacy of their apps. The others have business models based entirely on selling user data.
The contentious element is the "within the bounds of the law" bit. In the US and Europe that means a lot, because Apple can use the courts to block government overreach and they have done so. In China they can't do that, so they don't just as nobody else operating within China can.
Google does deserve credit for refusing to operate their search services within China, while Apple and many other companies decided they were willing to do business there on Chinese government terms.
I'm genuinely getting pretty annoyed by this increasingly prevalent style of know-it-all neo-ludditism that manifests as middlebrow, pithy dismissals of entire technologies with obvious benefits.
If you have a viewpoint on the relative risks of these technologies, the I genuinely wish you'd use your time to talk productively about what you think the risks are to help others make an informed choice – instead of sarcastically assuming that anybody who doesn't have the exact same set of priorities as you is a fucking idiot. It's making the quality of discussion on this site totally unbearable.
Well, asbestos has obvious benefits. It's an amazing, cheap way to insulate things, and it's very resistant to fire.
We knew abestos was dangerous even before the WW2, and kept using it because it was so convenient.
That's the thing about know-it-all neo-ludditism pithy dismissals. They started 30 years ago witha much more soft tone. But since not only people ignored the warnings, but eventually even came to insult the people performing said warning (even after the warning proved to be true), the same people turned kinda sarcarstics.
Poor you to have to read a rational argument in a comment using history and logic to underline our societies shit where they eat and ignore the asymetry of risk.
Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions. They should always stay perfectly calm and neutral while they feel like half of the population is setting us up for troubles.
>Poor you to have to read a rational argument in a comment using history and logic
Your comment above didn't actually contain any such thing. It contained a vestigial semblance of them too trivialised by vitriol to land a persuasive point.
>Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions.
Not always for sure, but yes that's often the case.
Because 3 letters agencies never, ever had backdoors in popular systems. It's not like the US had an illegal massive secret cabale dedicated to mass spying on its own population after all.
Luckily, Apple plateforms are notoriously open so it will be easy to check. It's great that we don't have to take their word for it after they lied about not being part of any PRISM-like program.
Anyways, all that doesn't matter much. Why would it be a problem when the economy, climate, international politics and the democracy are so stable these days? I can't see any reason why history would repeat and powerful entities would abuse any power they get.
Somebody who thinks like that would be a crazy tin hat conspirationist, and not at all a concerned citizen.
No, only the part of the population ready to spend hundred of dollars on an upgrade to get copy/paste must be capable of rational thinking. Anybody else is biased.
There is an optional feature where you can choose to share your current location using a satellite even if you don’t have coverage.
It would be stupid to use this capacity to track users because the data is not worth more than what you can get for free if you just cache the location and wait for the user to move into cellular coverage again. There is no conspiracy here.
Well, it's fairly easy to turn off. If you are in a situation in which you think you might be stalked through technology, you should certainly check your Find My along with any applicable location sharing Applications (both Android and Apple, such as google maps location sharing).
So I doubt this will be used much as a stalker feature. Unless of course they hide a phone on your person/vehicle in such a way that it is both totally unnoticeable to you AND maintains a very clear view of the sky. Apple said that sending messages could take a minute or more with even light foliage, so hiding it in/under a car will be a total no-go.
You have control over who can see your location in Find My. If a stalker has access, that means they're already someone you trust or you've never looked at the list of people you're sharing your location with.
They did mention it during the keynote, but it's not automatic. It appears you have to open Find My and click to share your location over satellite each time. Might be wrong though, they didn't go into detail.
I was under the impression that the iPhone needs to be very precisely pointed at a satellite for this to work. I doubt it can be done passively when the phone is in your pocket.
I have a Garmin InReach and it can send location periodically. While it is more effective to have it out and pointed at a satellite, it still works in my pocket, but may just take a little longer to send the messages. For a feature like Find My, many people won’t mind if the location being sent is a little stale, but with emergency SOS, you really want your message to go out ASAP, so it makes sense that you need to point at a satellite for SOS, but not for Find My tracking.
The InReach Mini has a helix antenna specifically built for maximum gain towards the sats though. The iPhone doesn't. Apple has even built in a pointing feature for it.
You can't even realistically point the InReach Mini at a satellite because it doesn't tell you where they are. At any time there's only a couple of iridium sats in view and they move quite fast across the sky.
But the device has an antenna with the right amount of upwards gain and the right polarisation to deal with that. For an iphone it's a lot harder to incorporate that.
The keynote had a lengthy explanation of how you have to point the phone at a satellite for the feature to work. The phone directs you how to point it.
I think you underestimate how many iPhones are sold per year, and how many phones Apple forecasts to sell for the 14 model which is satellite enabled. We're talking tens of millions
Couple that with phones that will roam into satellite coverage in rural areas... there will be extensive bandwidth requirements from this newly deployed fleet. Especially in the summer...
The ones that are going to be hurting right away are Garmin with their InReach line and Zoleo. This covers the most important thing that backcountry types pay monthly fees and carry an extra device for, which are emergencies, but Apple didn’t mention anything about two way texts which is a secondary but important use. Backcountry hunters will still pay money for now to be able to text home or send a message to the floatplane pilot but that’s not going to last for long. Overall what they showed in terms of positioning the phone to get a good satellite connection looks about as reliable and cumbersome as using an InReach, which is fine.
Today was a real shot at two of Garmin’s profit centres with the Apple Watch Pro also targeting their GPS sports watches.
I own a Garmin InReach that I regularly take with me on hiking expeditions (mostly Scotland, Iceland and South Africa) and it’s super handy on remote areas with no coverage. The ability to send an SOS is the main feature, but the two-way messaging system is just amazing for peace of mind, for me and my family.
However, the main thing about the InReach is its ruggedness and battery life, which I consider essential. I always carry an iPhone with me that I use when and if I get reception, but I need to carry a battery pack for it and it’s always in the back of my mind that an iPhone is a relatively fragile device and it’s one misstep away from cracking/breaking/etc, hence the inReach.
Moving forward, having both will be great, but I think having to rely only on an iPhone would make me a bit nervous, so I’m not sure how much of a threat this is for the inReach devices (at least for now).
I think this drastically underestimates or at least undersells the impact of convenience, or in this case the maximum possible level of convenience which is already having the feature even if you don't know it. Similar arguments could have and indeed were made for every other small electronic device the smartphone has replaced. It's not that the advantages you listed don't exist, it's just that they won't hold a candle to the explosion of smartphones with satellite messaging built in by default. I feel like even just 1 year (and 200 million satellite-enabled iPhones) from today pointing out these advantages is going to look like people pointing out that land lines have better audio quality and lower latency than cell phones.
I always carry my InReach with periodic location sharing enabled when I'm on backpacking trips. I also almost always carry it during international travel and road trips, but not usually with periodic location sharing. If iPhones start offering plans with periodic location sharing, I'm fairly confident that I'd stop carrying the InReach unless I was on a particularly remote trip that was outside of my comfort zone (which isn't something I really do anyway).
I may be taking trips you’d be uncomfortable with, but the InReach is invaluable for two-way messaging and weather updates. I haven’t needed the emergency service (knock on wood), but I’ve used most of the other things it does. My phone is a much better GPS, though, and if Apple makes it possible to do those two things I mentioned at first without it using much of the battery life I’d consider only keeping my InReach for extended trips.
There’s something to be said for convenience that worries me a bit with this. The amount of people that may be “misusing” this feature and the strain that it’s going to put on,say, mountain rescue. If people start feeling more confident than their capabilities, or they ignore weather reports just because they can be rescued with an iPhone, I don’t know what effect that’ll have on these resources.
It’s a reasonable question to ask what’s the effect of millions of people in cell-less areas who now can make a AFAIK SOS with no other context. I assume Apple has discussed this with various authorities however.
Some of these effects are already seen with cell phones. OTOH while no panacea, cell phones can help when someone is in genuine danger.
Genies and bottles and all that. Of course authorities may get more liberal with levying significant fines for people who get rescued because they were unprepared.
I'm a Paramedic in a California county that isn't even that far from San Francisco and we have a LOT of mountain range area with zero cell service at all. Even worse, our Motorola radios don't work up in the same hills either. We frequently get very vague and difficult to pinpoint locations for car accidents, medical emergencies, etc.
Now someone that is in a wreck or sees one can stay put and contact emergency services with a way more accurate location, and I think that's awesome.
I’m thinking of backcountry hunting applications personally. When I’ve been completely away from cellular service and put my phone on airplane mode and low brightness it goes for several days without a charge as a (not always on) gps and camera. Since these trips have usually been in groups of 3-4 the fragility of the phone is a smaller issue.
But I get what you’re saying, if you have 2 you have 1 and if you have 1 you have none. Some redundancy so nice and the iPhone as a backup to the inreach will be a likely set up.
I suspect Garmin is not immediately worried about the watches.
I'm currently wearing a Garmin Fenix 7, which recently replaced a Forerunner 645. I look forward to seeing the Ultra reviews, but it doesn't strike me as competitive yet. E.g., the 36 hours of battery life is surely exciting for Apple Watch fans, but my Fenix 7 gets 18 days of battery life. Or if I turn Battery Saver on, I get 57 days of usage vs 2.5 days for the Apple Watch Ultra.
And what really makes the Garmin stuff suited for sports is years and years of carefully designed specialist features. I'm not even much of an athlete but I really appreciate so much of what they offer.
If the price were better I could see it being a threat for Garmin's low-end models. But at $800? Even if I were an Apple fan I'd struggle at paying more money for less watch.
Agreed. There’s so much functionality in the Garmin watches. There are modes for every conceivable sport (and if it doesn’t have it, it’s in the add-on store for a few bucks). It’s got superb navigation features. And if the battery life is a worry you can get one with solar charging via the watchface.
An interesting bit about the solar stuff: when I was at REI and comparing the Fenix models, I asked if the Solar was really worth it. Even according to Garmin, the solar gets you an extra ~20% on battery life. The REI employee pointed out that for the $100 extra it cost, I could get a much more effective solar panel/battery combo that could not only charge my watch but other devices.
So I ended up getting the regular model, figuring if I ever needed solar anything, I'd come back and get the right panel for the trip. Yet another reason I'm happy to support my local REI store.
Very true! I do the same thing myself, since I prefer the sapphire crystal for durability (solar is not available on that one). I can see how it would be very useful for someone who's on an ultralight type of thing where they may not even have a cell phone.
I switched from Globalstar to Zoleo (Iridium) because Globalstar wasn't reliable enough for use cases like messaging the float plane pilot. I'd often have to wait for certain times of the day to send messages or make calls. This was at about 54 deg lat, so not in the fringes at all.
It may have been my device (older Qualcomm branded phone), but my experience seems consistent with what others report.
On the contrary, I've been very happy with the Zoleo device and service. It's been 100% reliable in all conditions even in the middle of the bush.
I'm pretty sure there won't be a two way feature here. They're using the same network as SPOT and the feature set looks very similar. With the classic SPOT, you can send one of three preset messages along with your coordinates, or send an emergency message. SPOT also lets you track, which is the same message format but the device sends it automatically at regular intervals.
Communication is one-way only and there is no way to verify delivery.
I agree that this will cut into InReach sales, because it provides about 70% of the capability and it's built into your phone. That said, the two way full text messaging and confirmation of delivery are huge advantages, especially if you actually plan to use it as opposed to it being a "just in case" communication device.
>This covers the most important thing that backcountry types pay monthly fees and carry an extra device for, which are emergencies,
I am not a backpacker, so maybe I am missing something but if it is JUST for emergencies what do the Paid services offer than a NOAA Registered PLB Device would not?
Being able to have a 2-way conversation with search & rescue to explain the situation and get updates is the biggest one.
As for other things worth paying for: being able to text your family back home and let them know you're running a day late but everything's ok so not to report you as missing goes a long way to helping everyone involved have some peace of mind.
Coordinating pickups and getting weather updates are also big value-adds.
Other have pointed out what the satellite communicators offer, but one feature that the PLBs exclusively have is a radio beacon which enables you to be found by triangulation. (I carry a PLB, who cares about texting. I just want to get rescued if I break my femur.)
Well I guess my comment was around the assertion that people would buy the Commercial service solely for emergencies, so in my view the PLB would fine if your use was only for Emergency Rescue.
If you need the other features then that makes a different argument but the original statement was that iPhone feature would kill these over devices because iPhone could be used to send emergency messages.
The findmy feature was in the press release. The aiming is probably only important for the sos case (sending the message immediately). Findmy can probably just update the location in the background whenever it gets a signal
Yes, findmy messages are store-and-forward. So the phone notices, "Huh, I saw something, when I was here, at this time, but I have no WiFi or cell signal" so it goes in a pile, and then a while later it has satellite, but still no WiFi or cell signal, so it sends out the pile.
I'm surprised it's worth doing this, I'd have expected that most findmy situations it's enough to get the pile of data hours or days later when somebody has Internet access again. Like, suppose I drop my airpods out of a pocket on some mountain trail on Saturday morning, a subsequent walker's iPhone sees them, but has no WiFi of course, however on Monday they're in the office, their iPhone reports it saw my airpods, X here at T time, and that's enough that I should be able (if I want) to go back and find them.
The place you might spend longer periods with only satellite is the open ocean, but basically if you lose shit in the ocean it's fucking gone.
Doesn't need to be that dramatic. Our Jeep got stuck in the Utah desert, and our guide had to pull out his Garmin satellite gadget to send a text message/coordinates for a friend to come pull us out. Lucky he had that thing. Yeah we could have hiked 3 miles over rugged terrain to a highway, but by the time we got there it would have been dark and we would have been exhausted. So we made the call. It wasn't life-or-death but it sure was convenient, saved us a lot of time, and allowed us to be back on schedule the next day. Definitely worth the investment. I'll be getting this iPhone for sure.
Good point. I did watch the keynote. SOS and Find My coordinates are the only explicitly specified use cases. But it's a paid service with the first 2 years free. I made the assumption you should be able to send text messages, because asking people to pay for a service that only lets you communicate with emergency services and that's all seems like a much less compelling product which is a bit un-Apple like. But then again, they have done lousy products before so it's possible they went with the less-compelling option.
Per a video someone else posted it seems there's communication with (probably just) emergency services which (for some use cases) is probably more useful than just a personal locator beacon.
For now! It would make sense for Apple to eventually own/manage a satellite fleet for global communication in the near future. The current carriers must be shitting their pants about this.
I'm not exactly sure what you're imagining, but there are fundamental physics problems in the way of just launching a bunch of satellites and enabling global communications.
Apple has partnered with Globalstar to use geostationary satellites to send incredibly small amounts of data measured in bytes, not kilobytes. These satellites have only limited bandwidth, and it's very expensive. And with the antenna size and power available in a phone today, it's never going to be more than kilobytes.
SpaceX Starlink/TMobile announced a much higher-bandwidth option, but it's incredibly fleeting, lasting just a few seconds.
Starlink satellites are in very low Earth orbit, moving at 8km/second. You can't just point an antenna at it and have it work. The antenna needs to track the satellite. And it needs to have a constant line of sight free of obstructions. Starlink currently builds a very cheap phased-array antenna, but it's still ~$1,000 to manufacture, it's a couple cubic feet in volume, and it uses >100 watts.
Starlink V2 will bring very large antennas to Starlink satellites which will enable direct 5G connectivity, but that connectivity will last for a few seconds, with perhaps thirty minutes between connections.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but no one knows how to build a satellite system currently that will cause any carriers to shit their pants.
Starlink V2 will bring very large antennas to Starlink satellites which will enable direct 5G connectivity, but that connectivity will last for a few seconds, with perhaps thirty minutes between connections.
It sounded like temporary connectivity was only initially; once they have a full shell of V2 satellites I would expect constant connectivity.
Indeed. Until a few years ago I was also under the impression that the satellite phone constellations were geostationary or at least geosynchronous. I remember growing up in the 90s hearing about satellite phones and how they had a very noticeable delay, which I assumed meant they were way up there. But perhaps that was just an older generation of constellations, because Globalstar and Iridium (by far the most popular networks in use by consumer-grade devices) are definitely LEO.
inmarsat does sell a handheld satellite phone product (google "inmarsat isatphone") which uses narrow band data channels and handhelds to talk to geostationary satellites. Its coverage is not quite as solid or reliable as iridium, because you can be easily obstructed by a mountain on your south side if you're at latitude 45N or something, and doesn't extend beyond about 70 degrees north, but it's also priced cheaper than iridium for the hardware and the monthly service.
what most people think of as a satellite phone is indeed LEO since iridium has the lion's share of the market.
Yeah but their satellites are basically oversized analogue relays. So bandwidth is bugger all with little capacity to increase it. So Leo or not it's like having CDMA speeds as your cap. Pretty much useless for anything other than a GPS location ping for emergency use.
The way technology is headed there is a 110% chance that the phased array tech gets miniaturized and put into a phone. And once the constellation is filled in, you’ll be able to find any tiny slice of sky and talk to a starlink sat that’s flying through it. Indoors is still a problem but who knows, things are always evolving.
You can't take say Moore's Law for chip tech and slap it on to radio tech. They're fundamentally different physical processes. There are limits to radio transmission and reception bandwidth and range due to the basic physics that you can't end run. The inverse square law is a harsh master, for any given level of technology a transmitter 100x closer is going to have a 10,000x advantage however you slice it.
What they might be able to do is expand this to something like limited texting, or maybe down the line even non-realtime voice messaging.
We are still able to have two-way communication with both Voyagers.
Google’s Lyra codec can already get down to 3Kb/s and be reasonably audible. It’s not a stretch to imagine within a few years we’ll be able to push that to below 1Kb/s.
Taking those two things together, I think it’s fairly reasonable to assume at least text and voice are within reach.
Reminiscent of Vernor Vinge's "evocations", as mentioned in A Fire Upon the Deep:
> The screen showed a color image with high resolution. Looking at it carefully, one realized the thing was a poor evocation…. Kjet recognized Owner Limmende and Jan Skrits, her chief of staff, but they looked several years out of style. Ølvira [the ship] was matching old video with the transmitted animation cues. The actual communication channel was less that four thousand bits per second; Central was taking no chances.
> [...]
> The picture was crisp and clear, but when the figures moved it was with cartoonlike awkwardness. And some of the faces belonged to people Kjet knew had been transferred […] The processors here on the Ølvira were taking the narrow-band signal from Fleet Central, fleshing it out with detailed (and out of date) background and evoking the image shown.
Sounds a lot like DALL-E plus a finely tuned training database on both ends could create this sort super-compression if we wanted to. I could imagine having a crisp, real-time (But artificial) 4K video conference at a few kb/s.
Sparse array fallacy. You can't make a phased array too small and have high directionality-- you lose all the power in the side lobes. This one's underlying physics.
If you use smaller antenna elements you must use a higher frequency, and higher frequencies are more attenuated by the earth's atmosphere (generally, when you get to THz there is a window or else visible light wouldn't be able to penetrate) so they have no chance of making it to a satellite.
If you use less elements you lose all your gain in the side lobes, as the other commenter mentioned
Phased arrays are already in phones that have mm wave antennas ;) usually only 1 dimension though. But it's not inconceivable they will add one capable to reach a satellite. Obviously the number of elements and thus the gain will be lower than the one Ina starlink station. But with slower speeds you don't need as strong a signal.
> Apple has partnered with Globalstar to use geostationary satellites
globalstar's existing network and licenses have nothing to do with geostationary at all.
please don't comment on things like this if you have fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of different types of mutually incompatible satellite network technology.
it's a well documented fact that typing in all lower case is very slightly faster for persons accustomed to it as a regular practice, which is a completely different thing than fundamentally misunderstanding the technical parameters of a L/S-band LEO vs geostationary data link, if we want to be pedantic about it.
Starlink is not going to be faster than this necessarily. Starlink is also low bandwidth, but has to be compatible with all phones. So they are not able to design hardware in the phone with a better antenna for this purpose as Apple can do.
> You can't just point an antenna at it and have it work. The antenna needs to track the satellite. And it needs to have a constant line of sight free of obstructions.
People already do this when communicating from the ground via amateur satellites on handheld radios. Here the fellow followed the sweep of the sky with his yagi.
The speeds Starlink will deliver are 2G speeds/device. They said 2-4Mbps/cell, and a cell is a wide area. I think it will have continuous coverage once the constellation reaches a certain size. AST SpaceMobile is planning 4g or 5g speeds/device with their 40 Gbps capable satellites.
Globalstar simplex only takes about 200 mW over 2 seconds to deliver a 72 byte message, into an antenna about 0 dBi gain. See the STX3 transmitter module.
They're funding a large amount of GlobalStar's future constellation, which seems like a pathway to ownership (if Globalstar goes under or apple can acquire without the debt burden)
It’s not obvious it would be had Apple not started pumping stratospheric amounts of money into them years ago. And they’re still pre-paying new fab development that TSMC might find it challenging to afford without them.
(Disclaimer: casual observer at best. May be misrepresenting what I’ve heard.)
There are a number of companies that can goe toe-to-toe with Apple that don't have the same approach, even if they can afford to. Apple and Walmart are known to put the to put on thumbscrews on their suppliers more than fellow behemoths in their respective industries.
This makes me think it's less of an affordability issue, and more of where they fall along spectrum on amount of margin that can be squeezed from smaller suppliers.
They described the bandwidth as tens of seconds to minutes for sending single, short, compressed messages, with your phone aimed right at a satellite for the duration. This isn't the kind of network which you "roam" with.
According to Wikipedia they have 52 first-generation satellites from the late 90s, and 24 second-generation satellites from around 2010. And if we go by Iridium's lifetime I wouldn't expect the first generation to still be operational.
Compared to Starlink's 2400 currently operational satellites that does seem low. Even compared to Iridium's 75 from the late 2010s, Globalstar's 24 seems small.
Current generation globalstar is about the same speed as first gen iridium, which is around the speed of a 2400 bps dialup modem from the late 1980s.
With the current satellites, yes, if they think they have enough capital (at least many hundreds of millions) to launch a new clean sheet of paper design LEO network using the existing globalstar L/S-band spectrum licenses, they could implement something better.
The value of globalstar is not in the existing satellites and earth stations, which are pretty much trash at this point for any modern use except very low data rate M2M data in certain geographically restricted areas. The value is in the existing LEO network operational licenses.
Yep, similar value is found on other technically inept solutions that are mostly kept around to keep the license to operate active (since some of those require active use to retain them).
The mentioned in the announcement developing a very efficient data codec for text compression, I'd presume something Binary and not over TLS, just raw data packets probably with some encryption
Given that they're transmitting an app form over to Apple's server, they could encode checkboxes with bitmaps and text fields with dictionary LZMA. There probably will be only a few bytes of the actual data per emergency submission + protocol authentication and error correction overhead.
I'm sure the Apple use case is different from a web api, but it was more for illustrative purposes. I imagine most developers know how to wrap data in JSON and how to do a HTTP call over TLS. When using that as a point of reference, having such a transmission take a long time might show how little bandwidth some M2M networks have (or need).
I wouldn't be surprised if the current Globalstar network is so limited it wouldn't even do voice.
Slightly apples-to-oranges comparison on the satellite count.
Unlike Globalstar, the Iridium network uses polar orbits which means they're covering a larger area and thus need more satellites to achieve comparable service in the limited latitudes that Globalstar covers.
(that being said, if you're going to be in mountainous terrain, higher latitudes, far from land, etc then Iridium will have better coverage)
>I wouldn't expect the first generation to still be operational
From Wikipedia:
>In 2007, Globalstar launched eight additional first-generation spare satellites into space to help compensate for the premature failure of their in-orbit satellites. Between 2010 and 2013, Globalstar launched 24 second-generation satellites in an effort to restore their system to full service.
Imagine a repeat of Hurricane Harvey, but this time people can request rescues via their iPhone’s satellite capability. That could generate a relatively high volume of traffic.
You do have to wonder at what point Apple decides they don't need Verizon, T-Mobile et. al. Maybe it's still a long ways off, but if you've gone through the effort of building relationships, hardware, software, etc to weave together a satellite network, why not just keep going down that path?
You're vastly underestimating the bandwidth required for cellular service. A starlink sat "cell" can do ~20gbit/sec (though I actually think real world performance will be massively lower). This covers hundreds of kilometres.
A single cell tower with 5G/4G is not far off doing that, per sector. And these cell towers can cover as little as 500m or less in dense urban areas. The problem is there are very real physics you come up against with this. We are really tapping out efficiency gains these days so the only option is more, higher frequency spectrum and much denser cell networks.
> A single cell tower with 5G/4G is not far off doing that, per sector.
Assuming you mean LTE when you say 4G, the per sector bandwidth is customarily an order of magnitude less than 20gbps. Even in the case of 5G, with sub-6Ghz anyway, you rarely will see above 15gbps. There’s only so many bits per second you can squeeze per megahertz and below 6Ghz the allocations there just isn’t enough available frequency. That’s why cell towers have gotten much closer together.
Where did I mention only sub 6GHz? With mmWave towers are comfortably pushing around 20gig. 4G (LTE) and 5G have similar bits/Hz loadings anyway.
And towers are getting closer together. You reduce transmit/receive power and place the towers closer, which results in similar coverage but less interference between cells (with reduced power output).
When you mentioned 4G in the same statement. The highest I’ve ever seen for a LTE tower in the US (I’ve been in 49 states and checked via field test equipment in multiple areas of each state, yes, I’m that nerd) was under 5gbps. LTE sectors more commonly are in the 1-2gbps range. As to 5G, sub 6Ghz it’s possible to get close to 20gbps air rate, but you need an very wide channel to do so (have to do the math, but I think >100mhz of spectrum) and I’m not aware of any US carriers doing so (but they could be). If we are talking the rare unicorn mmWave, the one with less than 1% of all US cell towers supporting, sure, 20gbps is common. Twice that isn’t unheard of either.
Long story short, we are violently agreeing both before and now. It’s just nuances we are both dinging the other for. Cheers!
If anything I see increased convergence between connectivity methods not any one technology supplanting another. Making your service plan able to connect the user from Wi-Fi + Celluar + Satellite when they are indoors, in a dense area, or far away will be able to deliver a far greater experience than locking into any single technology both in coverage and performance.
We already see this kind of thing already with T-Mobile + Starlink, Home internet providers bundling phone plans and allowing you to roam to other networks, traditional cellphone providers hopping on board Wi-Fi calling support, and Apple + Globalstar.
Not sure how much else they could do with it. You need to wave your phone around at the sky to send a few bytes of data. It must just be a really low capacity network.
Apple has apparently used a very very high gain (i.e. highly directional) antenna. That's how they got around having that big external antenna found on competitive hand-helds.
I quite like the idea of aiming it by hand using software as the guide.
Apple's antenna can only be smaller if it's lower gain. I would bet they're making that tradeoff because they don't need as much bandwidth. (Emergency pings could be measured in dozens of bytes, let alone kilobytes or megabytes.)
None of the RF ports come out to a connector so no that couldnt really work.
You CAN get high gain antennas for things like your WiFi router, it's my goto when an elderly relative complains about their wifi range.
You can't actually increase power with an (inactive) antenna but you CAN change it's radiation pattern. The higher gain omnidirectional antennas just take a radiation pattern that looks like a sphere (0dB gain) and squashes it into a donut shape. So you get more range laterally around the antenna at the expense of less above and below it
Maybe Globalstar needs a big antenna, but Iridium doesn’t. I have a Garmin InReach with a 1 inch antenna and it works fine without any antenna pointing antics.
There’s been a lot of research into emergency UX. Basically, it needs to be dead simple or people die. In an emergency, people are usually panicked, injured or in shock. The tool needs to do its thing simply and effortlessly to cut through the panic and confusion of a real emergency. I have an avalanche transponder that is one big button because when you friend just got buried under 20 tons of snow and rocks, you have the leftover brain for one button.
From the demo, I think Apple is very aware of this which is why they give you a series of canned prompts. They’ve probably already used up a significant cognitive load by having you point the phone for signal that having you type as well was considered dangerous.
> I have a Garmin InReach with a 1 inch antenna and it works fine
Your definition of the word “fine” is apparently rather generous. Be in an actual emergency situation and the InReach is down right frustrating as hell, but “better than nothing”. I don’t have optimism for Apple’s offering either for the record.
It's a bit slow to get a message out, but at least you can send a message. A traditional PLB might be faster but you can't transmit anything so the responders know zero about your situation. What the problem is, where you are exactly, how urgent it is, etc. I'll take InReach any day.
> It's a bit slow to get a message out, but at least you can send a message.
Tell that to a someone I know who had a broken leg and not only was the location way off, it took multiple hours to send. He was around a half mile of a well trodden hiking path too, so help took no time to get there once the message was actually broadcast (while the location was way off, he was visible from that wrong location). He wishes he’d had a loud whistle instead.
> I'll take InReach any day.
I’ll take my Inmarsat based phone any day. Sure, the monthly fee is 1.5x higher, but I know my message AND my call will go through as long as I have a clear view of the sky.
Ok I didn't realize it worked that badly sometimes :( For me it has always sent them within a couple of minutes.
I had a GEO satphone myself (Thuraya which is really cheap for airtime in Europe) before but as I hike through the mountains it's very hard to get a line of sight. So I didn't deem it useful enough for emergency.
Maybe I'll get a PLB too then, I'll think about it.
> I had a GEO satphone myself (Thuraya which is really cheap for airtime in Europe) before but as I hike through the mountains it's very hard to get a line of sight. So I didn't deem it useful enough for emergency.
Yeah, the iSatPhone2 is fairly forgiving on line of sight as long as you aren’t in a canyon or hiking up the north face of a mountain. Given they are in geosynchronous orbit, targeting is much easier (just point antenna south). My iridium I had back in the late 00’s was a PITA to get signal on a hike where we had to call for an air ambulance for emergency evac.
I see, the Thuraya had a bit of a hard time because it has only 1 sat covering Europe and it's all the way over Saudi Arabia. So it's not only up a long way but also quite far away geographically. I guess this is why it's so cheap in Europe (2 years airtime - not including calls - was about 40 euro IIRC, whereas with Iridium you would pay more than that every month!)
So it was a bit tricky to reach the sat especially in hilly or built up areas.
Modern PLBs send your location to both LEOSAR, MEOSAR and GEOSAR, as well as 121.5MHz homing signal for SAR responders that need to find you exact location (since you might not even have good GPS signal or GPS signal at all if you're in a canyon for example).
I've been using PLB for years and unless I'll only switch to Garmin InReach if I really need to communicate with people back home. Yes, it can be very handy, not just for that, but also to communicate with other fellow thruhikers in ways other than trail registers, but in some cases LEO might not be good enough for sending distress signal.
Could you recommend a PLB model? Like the other poster I didn't realize InReach can take hours sometimes. When I've tested it, it was always fast (not immediate but a couple minutes max)
I have the ACR ResQLink 375. It's the second one I own, the previous one I lost in the Pyrenees (attached it to by shoulder straps in a bad way and could not hear it fall due to the winds). The reason I mention it is that NOAA (which register each device) were extremely responsive when I reported it to them in case: 1. It somehow activates. 2. In case someone finds it and report back to them (they agreed to inform me if that happens).
While it might have been possible for me to retrieve it (I spent a day searching it) if it were a tracker device (such as InReach), I found that even if you find a Garmin device, Garmin support won't disclose any details about its owner or contact them on your behalf. I'm not sure if for privacy or commercial reasons but I just found it awkward (I didn't find a device myself, but learned about it through Garmin support forums).
If I were to buy a new PLB today, I would have considered the newer models with Return Link Service (such as ResQLink 410 RLS). It doesn't let you communicate, but notifies you that your distress signal has been delivered to.
Just read the other comment. While I guess hours response is an outlier in clear sky conditions, I really wish that Garmin would have made stats publicly available
Thanks for the feedback! I didn't realise or even consider these aspects of lost devices etc. I live near (well, sort of) near the Pyrenees and I walk through similar areas.
Because I already owned the InReach (I also used it as a backup for business travel in "less than safe" areas) I never really looked at PLBs. I will look at the ACR range. The prices look pretty OK considering the InReach has a fairly high monthly cost and these don't.
Want to know another great safety measure that only costs you around $100 w/ no monthly fee? Pick up a handheld ham radio. When you enter areas with rangers, stop and ask the emergency frequency they use.
Best to get a HAM license to be safe (it’s trivially easy to pass the General exam), but if you are only using it in an actual emergency, I highly doubt anyone will judge you too harshly for not having it.
> While I guess hours response is an outlier in clear sky conditions
It definitely is an outlier, maybe partially due to conditions (I wasn’t there, just was someone who received the other party’s messages way late), but that’s the point. An emergency situation is already an outlier as is, the last thing I want is to trust a device which has a definite probability of failure again. Screw “me” over once, shame on you. Twice? Shame on me.
> Apple has apparently used a very very high gain (i.e. highly directional) antenna. That's how they got around having that big external antenna found on competitive hand-helds.
> I quite like the idea of aiming it by hand using software as the guide.
In the event of an emergency, fumbling with my phone to find service sounds like a nightmare.
I don't know what the current state of the art is, but it sounds considerably easier to use than old satellite phones. Plus you don't have to lug around a satellite phone.
It sounds worse than current dedicated emergency beacons (which afaik usually are both satellite uplink and lower-frequency beacon), and I'd expect many/most people using them today will continue to carry them. But many people don't, and even if you do it is another fallback.
The best camera is the one you have with you, and no-one[*] carries around an SLR camera these days.
Similarly, the best emergency-alert system is the one you have with you. Apple is playing the long game, getting their feet wet in a new area, and providing some value. They will iterate, it's what they do.
[1] For some definition of "no-one". Obviously some people do carry around SLR's but it's a tiny minority.
I carry an InReach mini in my airplane when flying over wilderness areas. Unfortunately I don’t think I could trust the iPhone. With the Garmin you can press one button and it’ll send out an emergency beacon without having to aim it.
Where are you flying out of curiosity? Flying over sparsely populated areas of rockies in Colorado, I very frequently have cell service. Having said that, nothing wrong with being prepared, I'm just curious about your situation. I might start doing that too. I always figured if I actually went down, landing would be the hard part, not staying alive once I landed.
Those full bars of coverage you had at altitude are probably going to disappear the moment you lose line-of-sight.
That said, aircraft have ELTs which are supposed to trigger on impact and can be manually activated as well, so an InReach probably wouldn't make a life-or-death difference very often.
There are lots of great places to land, but being stuck in the desert without any way to communicate is a very real possibility (Ironically, even at many small town airports I’ve landed at).
To be fair I barely trust my InReach either. Overcast days, canyons, and any kind of tree cover consistently result in delayed or failed messages. And even if they report as "sent" on the device sometimes the recipient doesn't get them.
And for a dedicated device, the tracking feature is laughably bad with worse accuracy than my friend's watch.
Better than nothing in case of emergency but the reliability leaves a lot to be desired.
Are the messaging and emergency functions the same with those? For emergency beacons there is also a ~400Mhz frequency that is monitored independently (vs satellite communication at higher frequencies)
InReach uses the same 16xx Mhz Iridium frequency for everything. It does not have a 400Mhz PLB transmitter (which usually come with extendable antennas by the way, due to the ~ 70cm wavelength).
Even if it is a little worse, NO ONE is shelling out $600 for an InReach after this announcement. I am an avid backpacker who has resisted SatComs (partly for the price, partly because they ruin the experience maaaaan) and I can tell you with certainty that this put to bed any last chance of me purchasing an InReach
> In the event of an emergency, fumbling with my phone to find service sounds like a nightmare.
It doesn't have to be perfect, compared to the current alternative of 1) Having nothing to fumble around or 2) Be one of the few people with a full on expensive satellite phone I think it's a valuable addition.
Similar to how Chase Jarvis said "the best camera is the one you always have with you", this is also the case for emergency equipment.
If you’re in the middle of nowhere and have an emergency where seconds count, you’re dead anyway. This is the difference between rescue in 2 hours and 2 days (or even 2 weeks). Spending 5 minutes finding the transmitter isn’t a problem if you’re stuck with a broken leg. If you’re struggling to control critical bleeding or are doing CPR and are on your own (thus you can’t spend the 5 minutes finding a signal) then you’re screwed anyway.
In my state, emergency services point out that if you use an emergency locator such as a Garmin, you should expect that it may be a couple of days before rescue comes anyway. It depends on exactly where you are, of course.
The tens of thousands billed for a frivolous rescue request probably will stop the casual pranksters too, getting a helicopter out to wherever you're stuck isn't a free service. If you're really out in remote places often, you probably know this well enough to get rescue insurance.
Actually it depends. In Canada, many rescue services are free (North Shore Vancouver is a well known one here) as well as in the National Parks (the cost is essentially insurance paid for by the park pass fee) and many provincial parks.
There is an argument that pay for rescue causes people to hesitate to call and that can lead to worse outcomes and/or more dangerous rescue scenarios.
There is also an argument that free rescues lead to reckless behavior and worse outcomes, because if the worst happens you can always get a chopper to pick you up….
In my state, the bill will be in the five or six figures -- but if you were legitimately in real danger, they will usually opt not to charge you. If you called them by mistake or as a prank, you'll pay.
Apparently it works with Find My as well. I wouldn't be surprised if they started rolling out premium features that take more bandwidth once everybody's free two years expires.
This is it right here! The "emergency" part is a feel-good on top of the real service, which is location updates every X time even when off in no cell service land.
Yea this must be the main feature. And is pretty huge. The emergency thing is icing on the cake.
Unfortunately GlobalStar is probably one of the worst satellite constellations out there (that I know of at least) for actual communication (SPOT devices used or still use GlobalStar and are famously crap compared to Garmin inReach on Iridium). Of course it could be improved and they do have the bandwith licenses which is important.
Do I have to be the angry parent with the shotgun or are Apple going to make an honest woman out of Globalstar and just buy them. There is probably enough down the back of the sofa at cuppertino to cover it.
While we are at it someone might want to check Apple employee stock portfolios ... that is a strong 80% straight line rally in a bear market the last few months after they announced their profit margins were -72% in June
It wouldn't actually be smart to buy Globalstar, if Apple did they're on the hook for that 3.71B + the cost theyd spend on those messages.
This way they pay a relatively minute fee and can have a guarantee they can use Globalstar's existence to compete with others on with price. So they not only don't spend 3.71B they won't get back, the cost of those messages is relatively nothing and easy to compete on with others - for what is a commoditised service. They'd also force Globalstar to spend all that cash theyd get from Apple on their capex, at no risk to Apple.
Almost a similar reason to outsource to Foxconn vs buy them and have it in house.
> Do I have to be the angry parent with the shotgun or are Apple going to make an honest woman out of Globalstar and just buy them.
So the way to make an “honest woman” is to force somebody “to marry her at gunpoint” you say? The previous century called and would like their antiquated statements back. I’m sure you didn’t mean to be sexist, just pointing out the obvious about how bad that phrase is these days.
You can boycott a 2022 film with your outrage at the antiquated out of use phrase then. You can add to the offended people complaining about how inappropriate Amazon Studios productions are.
This is one thing that worries me about the feature. If you're stuck in the middle of nowhere with no coverage, presumably no power outlets..., is attempting to transmit a message going to work if you're sitting at 5% battery left?
SpaceX's offering is not 3G data speeds per user. It's 3G data speed shared between all users in a "cell". Current Starlink cells are 150 square miles. Which requires drastically limiting what users can use it for to avoid overwhelming the satellites. Initially they will only allow text messages (not just SMS though, they plan to support certain messaging apps). Maybe voice calls in the future.
But yeah, SpaceX's offering is going to be better if it works as advertised. Doesn't require buying a new phone. Doesn't require holding your phone pointing in a particular direction for minutes at a time. Can be used for any purpose, not just emergencies.
There's also ATS SpaceMobile which is similar to what SpaceX is doing but plans to use much bigger antennas on the satellites to offer higher bandwidth, enabling general data service rather than just SMS or voice. But they're a little farther out than SpaceX.
There are often way more than 4 million people within 150 miles of populated cities in the States (which consequently is also a large portion of the population). For many people 2-4mbps per cell is less than 1 bps which I think is unreal.
My guess is their estimates are off and that satellite net speeds don’t correlate directly to regular network speeds because of all the other factors. If it’s actually 2-4Mbps… yikes, this would only be useful when you’re far away from populated areas (which in all reality could be their intended use case)
Only using it in very remote areas that literally have no other communications available is exactly the point of the T-Mobile/Starlink service. Obviously they're not trying to outperform terrestrial cellular networks with satellite comms. So mostly the same use-case as the Apple/Globalstar service.
Except from the sounds of it the Apple service actually is something like 1bps, since they stated in the video it can take "only" 15 seconds to send one message. (assuming an emergency SOS message size of 15 bytes when compressed)
Starlink v2 satellites are being outfitted with giant (25 m^2) phased array antennae for this purpose, which they will use to communicate with normal cellular antennas in the PCS spectrum range (~1.9GHz)
While I wish it was Iridium I guess it sort of makes sense. Out of all the GMDSS satellite provider Globalstar had the weakest offshore coverage. It appears they focus on the probably more popular land based coverage rather than true global open water coverage. Iridium probably has more expensive product for true global coverage.
Globalstar having "weak" offshore and truly global coverage is because the present globalstar architecture is a bent pipe, a satellite needs to be simultaneously in view of a globalstar-run earth station and the end user terminal (handheld phone, data modem module with antenna, etc).
Globalstar in the serious two way satellite business has been a joke for 15+ years, everyone who needs something serious that'll work anywhere on the planet has implemented solutions with Iridium, or something else geostationary based for low data rate (inmarsat isatphone, if not needed for very high latitude services). Or of course the wide array of different types of Inmarsat medium speed much more costly data terminals for briefcase-size folding (BGAN terminals, etc), ground vehicles, ships and aviation.
One of the Inmarsat 3rd party RF/modem partners is now making a data terminal for the medium sized UAV market which is about 3.5 pounds of stuff total including the antenna and good for 200-300 kbps of data, albeit at a typically high inmarsat $ per MB cost.
Or with small ku/ka-band self aiming vsat terminals in radome (commonly seen on ships), which get costly, which are quickly having their market eaten by starlink's much higher speeds and lower costs.
The value of globalstar at this point is probably in its spectrum licenses and legal entity's ability to operate, which given sufficiently deep pockets in capital resources, can be replaced with much newer and better tech in the L/S-band satellite-to-phone RF segment. I would bet good money that the people who are bankrolling this believe that they now have reliable access to two things:
a) relatively low $/kilogram cost for launches to LEO on some spacex competitor
b) low cost per unit mass production of satellites in an assembly line fashion, much as starlink satellites are currently churned out in large quantities.
Obviously they now know that what Motorola designed in 1997 for satellite-to-satellite data links in the same orbital plane for Iridium was the right way to go, I'd be shocked if a replacement Globalstar network did not implement a more modern version of the same. Same general idea as spacex's beta satellite-to-satellite laser links.
In the defense contractor/military/DoD world I have literally never seen a Globalstar terminal in use for anything anybody cares about. The only globalstar phones I've seen were in the hands of the staff of enthusiastic-but-utterly-telecom-clueless international aid NGOs, which not surprisingly completely failed to work in the location where they were trying to use them. They ended up packing them back into their boxes, putting them in a closet and buying Iridium handhelds.
> Partner has agreed to make certain payments to the Company for (i) 95% of the approved capital expenditures Globalstar makes in connection with the new satellites described
I translate this as meaning that they intend to forklift upgrade the entire network to something that they think can reasonably compete with Iridium (and now SpaceX/Starlink) in addition to other regional players like Thuraya, and also of course Inmarsat.
Apple figured out how to effectively buy a satellite network without inheriting their pile of debt! What happens to the apple funded satellites if Globalstar goes under, is there some special clause that moves them directly to Apple?
If Apple really does acquire, I hope they ditch the bent pipe architecture, work on sat-to-sat connection, and most importantly for us, allow 2-way messaging on phones from sat, enough to send photos and stuff.
No. The terms seem designed to have the fallback option be for Apple to
purchase the company outright, or possibly to purchase at least a controlling interest.
They have rules requiring the current Executive Chairman to retain majority control for 5 years. They have a right of first offer with him if he wants to sell stock.
With the company they have the right to submit a counteroffer to any sale of assets required to provide the services, or proposed sales of the company itself.
All of this makes me feel that they want to have this company as an independent supplier, but have buying it up as their backup plan.
Globalstar is a terrible asset and has limbered along for 15 years. The fact that they would give up almost all their capacity without even calling for an acquisition speaks to their desperation, perhaps even Apple's
I am actually quite surprised that it hasn't gone fully belly up some time in the past 10-12 years as their product has been eclipsed by much more robust offerings from competitors. How they've limped along with additional funding I truly don't know.
> Global customer segments include oil and gas, government, mining, forestry, commercial fishing, utilities, military, transportation, heavy construction, emergency preparedness, and business continuity as well as individual recreational users.
From wikipedia.
Their customers seem to be pretty phone-call heavy industries, they aren't competitive on the data front, but aren't they cheaper than Iridium for phone calls?
Their satellite phones are absolutely ancient and look like 90s era Nokia. If voice was their competitive advantage you would assume they would invest heavily in keeping the equipment current. Looking at their service plans[0] I don't see anything compelling that matches Iridium or Inmarsat.
If one looks at the past 10 years of revenue and company size as a whole of Globalstar, it's absolutely minuscule as a corporate entity, apple could buy them on a casual whim.
It turns out that long-range sat-to-sat connections are actually really hard to do. SpaceX hasn't figured them out yet, and neither has any other LEO provider. The people who have figured them out are at MEO and higher, where you can have fewer satellites and they can be a lot more expensive, and they don't have any tricks: they just throw money and power at the problem.
They were figured out in ka band rf for iridium 24+ years ago, just at not very high data rates. For quite some period of time the entire iridium network worldwide talked to terrestrial networks in only two locations, Hawaii and Arizona.
I'm not sure what you mean by meo operators figuring them out because the only current noteworthy meo operator is o3b and their satellites are bent pipe architecture.
Oneweb satellites, which is presently an incomplete network, also do not implement satellite to satellite data links.
Globalstar was a joke, not because of its architecture, but because its satellites got irradiated and degraded to the point they couldn’t handle a phone-call even in their on-shore/near-shore use case.
Nobody is going to invest in satellite phones or credits for a provider that couldn’t do space right.
An interesting alternative to sat comms is HF-DL if you don’t care for security. Cool to see all the Russia seized and reregistered jetliner equipment pinging and hearing HF-DL stations around the world on ACARS. Slow though, 300-1200bps.
Various ham radio data modes for 1200 bps or approximately that speed can be implemented with big ass dipole and yagi uda antennas for directional data links, with standard crypto libraries between Linux systems operating as serial bridge, it's just very very slow. And it's a gargantuan pile of equipment and huge antenna compared to something like iridium.
How did they survive with such a degraded service, who is still using them when there are alternatives? Were they competitive back when they launched, but just couldn't fund maintenance? Iridium also had severe financial problems but their own constellation and services are still pretty reliable (all things considered), so I'm curious!
Can't imagine that the emergency SOS functionality will use 85% of their network, so it has to be other uses. The Find My functionality certain is one possible use case that they've discusses, but it's not clear when/how that will be used. Might be a "push to send location" manual function (which would take hardly any data), or it could be automagic (sending every X minutes when no cell service available).
Though I suspect there is more coming. Once the launch settles down, I wouldn't be surprised that with Apple's announcement of the service cost (beyond the initial free 2 years)... that something like 2 way messaging becomes available. To any iMessage compatible user, of course. As part of the paid feature set.
> or it could be automagic (sending every X minutes when no cell service available).
It wouldn't be automatic. If you watch the reveal today, they show how they avoided adding in a satellite antenna: it's communications to a satellite is weak and requires manually holding up the phone pointed at a specific direction (it appears the iPhone keeps an offline copy of ephemeris data so it knows where the satellites are located and can tell you exactly where to point).
Globalstar also has spectrum and the capability to have ancillary terrestrial ground systems. Apple could just buy them now and roll out its own cell network.
> Partner has agreed to make certain payments to the Company for (i) 95% of the approved capital expenditures Globalstar makes in connection with the new satellites described
The real secret that will be studied in business school for decades to come is Apple's supplier model.
Their strategy uniquely gives you the upside of internal R&D (pace, funding, and direction are set by you) with none of the downside (potential disruption by new technologies). Apple can drop a supplier on a dime if a disruptive technology comes out. If that same tech was being developed in house, there would have been too much internal politics and momentum for that switch to happen. But because they bankroll capex, they have control over the direction and pace of incremental R&D.
Note that Tim Cook and Jeff Williams the COO and Tim's right hand human, spent their entire careers before senior leadership managing Apple's supply chain.
“On September 7, 2022, Partner and Thermo entered into a lock-up and right of first offer agreement that generally (i) requires Thermo to offer any shares of Globalstar common stock to Partner before transferring them to any other Person other than affiliates of Thermo and (ii) prohibits Thermo from transferring shares of Globalstar common stock if such transfer would cause Thermo to hold less than 51.00% of the outstanding common stock of the Company for a period of 5 years from the Service Launch (as defined below). This agreement does not prohibit the Company from entering into a change of control transaction at any time.”
Seems highly likely, acquiring Globalstar that is. Having one customer account for 85% of your business, however you want to count that, is extremely risky.
I had a previous employer who would get concerned when one customer accounted for 20%+ of revenue. You can sort of fix this by increasing revenue, but Globalstar sold 85% of capacity, for a resource that is expensive and difficult to increase. The upside is that many customers will want to be on the same service as Apple, so that might help grow their business.
Or hedge their bets by buying a right of first refusal option from Globalstar should anyone else try to acquire them while leaving Apple free to look for other options and partners.
The feature is sold as a two year free subscription to the service, not a feature of the device. That suggests to me Apple isn't committed to this forever. They want do be able to abandon the technology and human staffed relay infrastructure if this is eclipsed by satellite 5G or some other option and not get sued in 195 countries for breaking a device feature after the sale.
I don't read this as lack of commitment, I read this as "we want to keep a limit on the total number of active devices" - if it's free for two years then there will be a moderate percentage that always have it because they refresh their device every two years or less, there will be a significantly smaller percentage that use an older device and choose to pay the ongoing fee, and a much larger percentage that keep the device longer than two years but don't pay the fee. This last category is how they'll effectively manage the ongoing costs - anyone who isn't a frequent customer or willing to pay is excluded. It's a solid model.
> That suggests to me Apple isn't committed to this forever.
Apple TV+ is also offered as 1 year free service when you buy a new phone, then you can also say the same about it, but - in fact - needless to say, Apple is committed to it.
I am curious how the payment of this service works.
Apple doesn't mention any additional payment necessary for this feature. But clearly GlobalStar is being compensated heavily by Apple to allocate 85% of their capacity to them. So my question is, who flips the bill? Is Apple paying out of the goodness of their hearts (more realistically as a loss leader to sell more iPhones), or is Apple forcing the carriers like AT&T and Verizon to kick-back a portion of the monthly bill (maybe $1-$2 per user) to GlobalStar for coverage.
I suspect it is the latter, which is why we only see this feature available in select markets. Those are probably the markets where Apple has required all its iPhone carriers to agree to this payment.
Somehow GlobalStar gets paid and its not coming from the end-users (not directly at least).
During the announcement apple mentioned that this comes with iphone 14 for free for 2 years. So possibly apple just thinks there's huge opportunity for growth here
the announcement says that the SOS feature is only available for free for 2 years after purchase. I am speculating that Apple will bill customers directly for satellite feature subscriptions.
Sounds like those of us on a 2 year upgrade cycle will get it for free then.
However, I'd expect them to roll it into Apple's aggregated services packages too at an economical price, an Apple One Premier + Satellite SOS, if you will.
Actually GlobalStar has some of the weakest satellite coverage in the satellite market. It covers North America and Austrailia very thoroughly. But only covers other continents partially. It covers 3/4 of South America, only western Europe, and only really covers Japan and Singapore in Asia. There is almost no ocean coverage.
The Iridium network (which is what Garmin uses) covers nearly everything outside of the north and south poles. This includes all the oceans and basically all habitable land. That is why Iridium has dominated the satellite market for so many years over GlobalStar. Garmin satellite devices (like InReach) uses Iridium. But they also have non-trivial costs associated with that coverage.
As someone who has used these satellite communicators for years, don't get your hopes up on using these all the time like an extension of your phone. Sending messages over satellite is painfully slow, even with devices with advanced helix antennas (which the iPhone doesn't have). It can take minutes to send a single text message. Phone communicators sometimes have 20-30+ second lag in them.
I have InReach and yeah I know it's not fast. It's fine for what it is though. I'm not going to have deep conversations on it.
I didn't realize Globalstar was that bad though. I knew it wasn't great due to the bent pipe network which precludes signals far out at sea etc. I've seen several hikers with Spot devices and they didn't seem unhappy with them. Mostly Americans though.
Let’s think three moves ahead here. Apple starts off with this good-publicity, peace-of-mind emergency service, gets a bunch of practice testing the technology in real-world situations, iterates and tweaks for a couple years, and then maybe in 2026 there’s a version of the iPhone that can use satellite communication for everyday non-emergency purposes.
Reminiscent of how google maps (on cellphones) killed standalone GPS trackers, this may hurt Garmin InReach type devices quite a bit, not that there is a huge market for that in the first place.
I don’t think this will significantly impact inReach sales. The Globalstar network is not a serious competitor to Iridium for life-critical applications, and inReach-type devices have far wider operating ranges (try sending an SOS from your iPhone when the battery dies in any sort of sub-freezing weather) and much longer battery life.
Apple is not paying for the rescue. Neither is Garmin when you press the sos button on their phones.
Whatever is the cost of insurance for that type of service at Garmin and the dozens of competitors, I can assure you it did not come from the pocket of their CEO.
Even if you steal a phone and call for a rescue, whoever did the rescue will get paid regardless of your situation. The insurance company will sue your ass to the grounds, but that's a different discussion.
I'm not understanding the math. Globalstar satellites (I assume) are each individually able to transmit/receive dozens-to-hundreds of voice calls.
An iPhone is -- and only when out of cellular coverage -- transmitting position or message packet of a few Kb (?) very infrequently via the satellite. Multiply by even a few thousands of iPhones per satellite (if that), how does this equal 85% of satellite capacity?
It'd be interesting to know whether this is uplink-only, like most devices of the Spot series of devices on Globalstar, or whether the iPhone can also receive acknowledgements from the satellite.
As far as I understand, Globalstar's downlink capacity is (or at least was) severely limited and also uses a different frequency band than their uplink.
That is a very important feature – knowing whether an SOS went through is extremely important in a life-or-death situation (for making the decision of whether to best stay put or try to climb to better signal etc).
PLBs are actually gaining that feature as well (by using Galileo as the forward path for the acknowledgement signal) for the same reason.
globalstar as a corporate entity is in such a weak and precarious financial position (due to its near obsolete satellite tech and existing network), with no money to fund the many hundreds of millions needed for a new build+launch campaign, that any partnership of this type is a life saver.
without this deal it would be inevitable for the company to get acquired and broken up for just the value of its operating and spectrum licenses.
Apple also appears to be taking an ownership stake in the company so that probably aligns the incentives and reduces the chance of them cutting and running.
If I’m reading this filing right, Apple have committed to using 85% of Globalstars satellite network capacity for the new emergency messaging feature. It’s seems astonishing to me that they would be using this much bandwidth for that emergency feature, and (at least initially) only on a small portion of iPhones.
My only thinking is that they may be planning to make the satellite network available to none emergency messaging too, and that’s what’s covered in this filing.
It isn't just used for the emergency feature, it is also used for the "Find My" network. I suspect more traffic will come from "Find My" than from the emergency feature.
Does it mean that Apple tags will also be tracked everywhere on Earth? I feel an urge to have an always on detector for those devices.
Source? That seems like a big omission from their keynote earlier today.
It wasn't omitted. It was covered in the keynote. It's also on their website:
Apple's always-on pingback no matter where you go in the globe, even if you disable cell networks. I do believe they care about privacy, though if you look at features like this it's easy to see that they can be worse than Google if they wanted.
Except this (currently) requires users to point their phone at a satellite so it can connect and transmit, with clear line of site of the sky. It seems it will be more likely something you'd do when you get to your "campsite" and want friends/family to know where you are located.
edit: I didn't realize this will apparently be required due to the antenna design in the iPhone, seems very cumbersome, you can't easily see where the satellites are...
You don't really need to point it, at least with my inreach if its near the top of my pack and I'm not in a canyon or something I can get a message out.
> you can't easily see where the satellites are...
Which is why when you're using it they guide you on how to orient the phone (per their released info so far, we'll have actual user reports in a few weeks).
I look forward to whatever video game they create where you get the rescue points for holding your phone in the right orientation.
And if you don't, it presumably says "you're holding it wrong!"
Your in reach uses 1.6 GHz at 31.5 dBm for one of the bands and 2.4 GHz at 5 dBm for the other.
That's 1.412538 watts versus 0.003162 watts... hence why you can just leave it in your pack.
That limitation will have to be fixed before this accounts for 85% of a satellite network's capacity.
Airplane mode.
Of course if you don’t trust that, you shouldn’t be buying an Apple product anyways. They could ship an always on microphone streaming to their servers if they wanted to. But we trust that they won’t.
Faraday bag or turned off in a freezer “stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
Edward J. Snowden insisted that a group of lawyers advising him in the Chinese territory “hide their cellphones in the refrigerator of the home where he was staying, to block any eavesdropping,”
https://archive.nytimes.com/thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/0...
Find my works even if the iphone is turned off - does airplane mode stop this?
Since we can't remove batteries I know a mylar Cheetos snack bag does the trick.
https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/
Make of that what you want
The toggles to turn off this feature (as well as Find my in general) do stop this.
That’s opt-in though.
I agree with your sentiment but this seemed in the keynote to be something you had to do on purpose and not like the normal always on find my.
Correction: if they shareholders wanted.
AirTags are even more compelling when your sensor fabric is satellite comms enabled.
Not if you can’t share them with family.
What the hell is that all about?
If this has changed, scratch all of the above.
I had the (dumb) idea of putting an AirTag in the family car, with the idea of being able to get a rough idea of where it is parked without depending on the terrible manf provided app. Every time my partner would drive the car it would ping away for a good 2-3 minutes due to the safety notifications. We're all part of the same family account, I don't really understand why it isn't an option to just ignore it.
> We're all part of the same family account, I don't really understand why it isn't an option to just ignore it.
Because there are way too many spouses who go to as absurd lengths as setting private investigators on their partners. Stalking is just as much a concern inside families as it is for everyday persons - I might be tempted to say that the impact is worse given the potential for domestic violence. Or just imagine fundamentalist parents tracking their children to Planned Parenthood, a known LGBT-friendly place or whatever.
Ideally, there would be laws and regulations on trackers - and not just hardware-ones like the AirTags, but also software-based ones - that mandate features to prevent abuse, but sadly politicians haven't caught up on tech developments yet.
That still doesn't explain why it's not an option _for nikdoof's partner_ to choose to disable notifications from that particular AirPod. It makes total sense why nikdoof shouldn't be able to disable it for their partner.
> That still doesn't explain why it's not an option _for nikdoof's partner_ to choose to disable notifications from that particular AirPod.
Coercion, simple as that.
Wait, I might not be understanding the threat model here. The situation I imagined was: persons A and B are spouses, A wants to track B, so since A and B are in a family unit, A would want to disable the "You're being followed" alert for B without B knowing.
If A had to coerce B to turn of the alert, then the alert would have already served its purpose to tell B that they're being tracked by A. Moreover, there should still be some interface which B can use to figure out which AirTag is following them, so person B would 1) know that A is tracking them in general, and 2) have the ability to check whether A is tracking them in the moment.
Please explain what additional information or utility the continued notification is giving person B in this moment, or if my understanding of the hypothetical is wrong.
The threat model is that B has no way of knowing if she is actually being tracked (or if she could potentially be), or if A has just made empty threats. By coercion - or by manipulating the setting on his own on B's phone without A knowing -, A could prevent her from finding out that she could be tracked by someone.
And here we are - I haven’t bought any.
I want to track the dog, the shared cars’ keys. I want to track a shared bike. There are a load of items I’d put them on, but they aren’t just mine.
I don’t believe it’s a security thing. It’s the Apple way to get software to a point then just stop development, there are plenty of examples.
Apple however can't differentiate between someone wishing to track their dog and someone wishing to track their spouse - at that point basic ethics come to play. It's bad enough that AirTags even exist, the absurd amount of stalking cases proves it, but now Apple is all but forced to rein the bullshit in.
Ah, tracking the entire population even in the highest mountain and the deepest desert.
And all that to protect your love ones, of course.
People apparently forgot all about PRISM already. That didn't take long.
Its amazing to me how easily people are willing to give Apple their data compared to Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Specially looking at how Apple was to willing to put its servers in countries that want control of the data. I think people seem to forget the privacy fight was not about privacy from advertisers but from government over reach. People are looking at Google for building skynet but Apple seems to be successfully building it and people are enthusiastically adopting it.
Apple has a really strong track record of resisting Government intrusion, within the bounds of the law, not selling customer data to third parties, and holding app developers to account for the privacy of their apps. The others have business models based entirely on selling user data.
The contentious element is the "within the bounds of the law" bit. In the US and Europe that means a lot, because Apple can use the courts to block government overreach and they have done so. In China they can't do that, so they don't just as nobody else operating within China can.
Google does deserve credit for refusing to operate their search services within China, while Apple and many other companies decided they were willing to do business there on Chinese government terms.
Apple is much better at marketting than Google, Facebook or Microsoft.
I'm genuinely getting pretty annoyed by this increasingly prevalent style of know-it-all neo-ludditism that manifests as middlebrow, pithy dismissals of entire technologies with obvious benefits.
If you have a viewpoint on the relative risks of these technologies, the I genuinely wish you'd use your time to talk productively about what you think the risks are to help others make an informed choice – instead of sarcastically assuming that anybody who doesn't have the exact same set of priorities as you is a fucking idiot. It's making the quality of discussion on this site totally unbearable.
Well, asbestos has obvious benefits. It's an amazing, cheap way to insulate things, and it's very resistant to fire.
We knew abestos was dangerous even before the WW2, and kept using it because it was so convenient.
That's the thing about know-it-all neo-ludditism pithy dismissals. They started 30 years ago witha much more soft tone. But since not only people ignored the warnings, but eventually even came to insult the people performing said warning (even after the warning proved to be true), the same people turned kinda sarcarstics.
Poor you to have to read a rational argument in a comment using history and logic to underline our societies shit where they eat and ignore the asymetry of risk.
Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions. They should always stay perfectly calm and neutral while they feel like half of the population is setting us up for troubles.
>Poor you to have to read a rational argument in a comment using history and logic
Your comment above didn't actually contain any such thing. It contained a vestigial semblance of them too trivialised by vitriol to land a persuasive point.
>Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions.
Not always for sure, but yes that's often the case.
Oh but this comment is part of a thread. Because comments are in a context. Like this one, from 6 hours ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32763171
You should read up on how AirTags work; Apple does not ever know the location of any person or their stuff. Good read: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec6cbc80fd0/...
There are articles/white papers available, showing Find My info is only visible to people you authorize it to.
Sure.
Because 3 letters agencies never, ever had backdoors in popular systems. It's not like the US had an illegal massive secret cabale dedicated to mass spying on its own population after all.
Luckily, Apple plateforms are notoriously open so it will be easy to check. It's great that we don't have to take their word for it after they lied about not being part of any PRISM-like program.
Anyways, all that doesn't matter much. Why would it be a problem when the economy, climate, international politics and the democracy are so stable these days? I can't see any reason why history would repeat and powerful entities would abuse any power they get.
Somebody who thinks like that would be a crazy tin hat conspirationist, and not at all a concerned citizen.
No, only the part of the population ready to spend hundred of dollars on an upgrade to get copy/paste must be capable of rational thinking. Anybody else is biased.
which changes nothing, they're free to do whatever they want in actual code.
There is also no source code or even audit by 3rd parties (that are not US government related)
> And all that to protect your love ones, of course.
And for your own privacy!
> You can now
There is an optional feature where you can choose to share your current location using a satellite even if you don’t have coverage.
It would be stupid to use this capacity to track users because the data is not worth more than what you can get for free if you just cache the location and wait for the user to move into cellular coverage again. There is no conspiracy here.
How soon till this is just. A stalker feature
Well, it's fairly easy to turn off. If you are in a situation in which you think you might be stalked through technology, you should certainly check your Find My along with any applicable location sharing Applications (both Android and Apple, such as google maps location sharing).
So I doubt this will be used much as a stalker feature. Unless of course they hide a phone on your person/vehicle in such a way that it is both totally unnoticeable to you AND maintains a very clear view of the sky. Apple said that sending messages could take a minute or more with even light foliage, so hiding it in/under a car will be a total no-go.
You have control over who can see your location in Find My. If a stalker has access, that means they're already someone you trust or you've never looked at the list of people you're sharing your location with.
They did mention it during the keynote, but it's not automatic. It appears you have to open Find My and click to share your location over satellite each time. Might be wrong though, they didn't go into detail.
I was under the impression that the iPhone needs to be very precisely pointed at a satellite for this to work. I doubt it can be done passively when the phone is in your pocket.
I have a Garmin InReach and it can send location periodically. While it is more effective to have it out and pointed at a satellite, it still works in my pocket, but may just take a little longer to send the messages. For a feature like Find My, many people won’t mind if the location being sent is a little stale, but with emergency SOS, you really want your message to go out ASAP, so it makes sense that you need to point at a satellite for SOS, but not for Find My tracking.
The InReach Mini has a helix antenna specifically built for maximum gain towards the sats though. The iPhone doesn't. Apple has even built in a pointing feature for it.
You can't even realistically point the InReach Mini at a satellite because it doesn't tell you where they are. At any time there's only a couple of iridium sats in view and they move quite fast across the sky.
But the device has an antenna with the right amount of upwards gain and the right polarisation to deal with that. For an iphone it's a lot harder to incorporate that.
If the phone detects you're away from the network, they could prompt you to update your location every once in a while.
If you use it and the antenna side faces the sky it will eventually hit some satellite
globalstar uses LEO satellites which are in constant motion, there is no way that you must point at them to make these features work
The keynote had a lengthy explanation of how you have to point the phone at a satellite for the feature to work. The phone directs you how to point it.
yeah I did not watch that, I am wrong. Seems pretty lame for a supposedly emergency service.
I think you underestimate how many iPhones are sold per year, and how many phones Apple forecasts to sell for the 14 model which is satellite enabled. We're talking tens of millions
Couple that with phones that will roam into satellite coverage in rural areas... there will be extensive bandwidth requirements from this newly deployed fleet. Especially in the summer...
phones that will roam into satellite coverage in rural areas
That's not what Apple announced. Satellite service is only for emergencies and is cumbersome to use.
The ones that are going to be hurting right away are Garmin with their InReach line and Zoleo. This covers the most important thing that backcountry types pay monthly fees and carry an extra device for, which are emergencies, but Apple didn’t mention anything about two way texts which is a secondary but important use. Backcountry hunters will still pay money for now to be able to text home or send a message to the floatplane pilot but that’s not going to last for long. Overall what they showed in terms of positioning the phone to get a good satellite connection looks about as reliable and cumbersome as using an InReach, which is fine.
Today was a real shot at two of Garmin’s profit centres with the Apple Watch Pro also targeting their GPS sports watches.
I own a Garmin InReach that I regularly take with me on hiking expeditions (mostly Scotland, Iceland and South Africa) and it’s super handy on remote areas with no coverage. The ability to send an SOS is the main feature, but the two-way messaging system is just amazing for peace of mind, for me and my family. However, the main thing about the InReach is its ruggedness and battery life, which I consider essential. I always carry an iPhone with me that I use when and if I get reception, but I need to carry a battery pack for it and it’s always in the back of my mind that an iPhone is a relatively fragile device and it’s one misstep away from cracking/breaking/etc, hence the inReach.
Moving forward, having both will be great, but I think having to rely only on an iPhone would make me a bit nervous, so I’m not sure how much of a threat this is for the inReach devices (at least for now).
I think this drastically underestimates or at least undersells the impact of convenience, or in this case the maximum possible level of convenience which is already having the feature even if you don't know it. Similar arguments could have and indeed were made for every other small electronic device the smartphone has replaced. It's not that the advantages you listed don't exist, it's just that they won't hold a candle to the explosion of smartphones with satellite messaging built in by default. I feel like even just 1 year (and 200 million satellite-enabled iPhones) from today pointing out these advantages is going to look like people pointing out that land lines have better audio quality and lower latency than cell phones.
I always carry my InReach with periodic location sharing enabled when I'm on backpacking trips. I also almost always carry it during international travel and road trips, but not usually with periodic location sharing. If iPhones start offering plans with periodic location sharing, I'm fairly confident that I'd stop carrying the InReach unless I was on a particularly remote trip that was outside of my comfort zone (which isn't something I really do anyway).
I may be taking trips you’d be uncomfortable with, but the InReach is invaluable for two-way messaging and weather updates. I haven’t needed the emergency service (knock on wood), but I’ve used most of the other things it does. My phone is a much better GPS, though, and if Apple makes it possible to do those two things I mentioned at first without it using much of the battery life I’d consider only keeping my InReach for extended trips.
There’s something to be said for convenience that worries me a bit with this. The amount of people that may be “misusing” this feature and the strain that it’s going to put on,say, mountain rescue. If people start feeling more confident than their capabilities, or they ignore weather reports just because they can be rescued with an iPhone, I don’t know what effect that’ll have on these resources.
It’s a reasonable question to ask what’s the effect of millions of people in cell-less areas who now can make a AFAIK SOS with no other context. I assume Apple has discussed this with various authorities however.
Some of these effects are already seen with cell phones. OTOH while no panacea, cell phones can help when someone is in genuine danger.
Genies and bottles and all that. Of course authorities may get more liberal with levying significant fines for people who get rescued because they were unprepared.
I'm a Paramedic in a California county that isn't even that far from San Francisco and we have a LOT of mountain range area with zero cell service at all. Even worse, our Motorola radios don't work up in the same hills either. We frequently get very vague and difficult to pinpoint locations for car accidents, medical emergencies, etc.
Now someone that is in a wreck or sees one can stay put and contact emergency services with a way more accurate location, and I think that's awesome.
Thank you for serving humanity!
I’m thinking of backcountry hunting applications personally. When I’ve been completely away from cellular service and put my phone on airplane mode and low brightness it goes for several days without a charge as a (not always on) gps and camera. Since these trips have usually been in groups of 3-4 the fragility of the phone is a smaller issue.
But I get what you’re saying, if you have 2 you have 1 and if you have 1 you have none. Some redundancy so nice and the iPhone as a backup to the inreach will be a likely set up.
I suspect Garmin is not immediately worried about the watches.
I'm currently wearing a Garmin Fenix 7, which recently replaced a Forerunner 645. I look forward to seeing the Ultra reviews, but it doesn't strike me as competitive yet. E.g., the 36 hours of battery life is surely exciting for Apple Watch fans, but my Fenix 7 gets 18 days of battery life. Or if I turn Battery Saver on, I get 57 days of usage vs 2.5 days for the Apple Watch Ultra.
And what really makes the Garmin stuff suited for sports is years and years of carefully designed specialist features. I'm not even much of an athlete but I really appreciate so much of what they offer.
If the price were better I could see it being a threat for Garmin's low-end models. But at $800? Even if I were an Apple fan I'd struggle at paying more money for less watch.
Agreed. There’s so much functionality in the Garmin watches. There are modes for every conceivable sport (and if it doesn’t have it, it’s in the add-on store for a few bucks). It’s got superb navigation features. And if the battery life is a worry you can get one with solar charging via the watchface.
An interesting bit about the solar stuff: when I was at REI and comparing the Fenix models, I asked if the Solar was really worth it. Even according to Garmin, the solar gets you an extra ~20% on battery life. The REI employee pointed out that for the $100 extra it cost, I could get a much more effective solar panel/battery combo that could not only charge my watch but other devices.
So I ended up getting the regular model, figuring if I ever needed solar anything, I'd come back and get the right panel for the trip. Yet another reason I'm happy to support my local REI store.
Very true! I do the same thing myself, since I prefer the sapphire crystal for durability (solar is not available on that one). I can see how it would be very useful for someone who's on an ultralight type of thing where they may not even have a cell phone.
I switched from Globalstar to Zoleo (Iridium) because Globalstar wasn't reliable enough for use cases like messaging the float plane pilot. I'd often have to wait for certain times of the day to send messages or make calls. This was at about 54 deg lat, so not in the fringes at all.
It may have been my device (older Qualcomm branded phone), but my experience seems consistent with what others report.
On the contrary, I've been very happy with the Zoleo device and service. It's been 100% reliable in all conditions even in the middle of the bush.
I'm pretty sure there won't be a two way feature here. They're using the same network as SPOT and the feature set looks very similar. With the classic SPOT, you can send one of three preset messages along with your coordinates, or send an emergency message. SPOT also lets you track, which is the same message format but the device sends it automatically at regular intervals.
Communication is one-way only and there is no way to verify delivery.
I agree that this will cut into InReach sales, because it provides about 70% of the capability and it's built into your phone. That said, the two way full text messaging and confirmation of delivery are huge advantages, especially if you actually plan to use it as opposed to it being a "just in case" communication device.
Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41EdCXjotmo
It's clearly two-way.
>This covers the most important thing that backcountry types pay monthly fees and carry an extra device for, which are emergencies,
I am not a backpacker, so maybe I am missing something but if it is JUST for emergencies what do the Paid services offer than a NOAA Registered PLB Device would not?
Being able to have a 2-way conversation with search & rescue to explain the situation and get updates is the biggest one.
As for other things worth paying for: being able to text your family back home and let them know you're running a day late but everything's ok so not to report you as missing goes a long way to helping everyone involved have some peace of mind.
Coordinating pickups and getting weather updates are also big value-adds.
Not clear the phone will have two way capabilities.
Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41EdCXjotmo
It will definitely be two-way.
Ah. Ok. Though apparently just with emergency dispatchers. Though that is more useful than just a beacon in a number of respects.
Other have pointed out what the satellite communicators offer, but one feature that the PLBs exclusively have is a radio beacon which enables you to be found by triangulation. (I carry a PLB, who cares about texting. I just want to get rescued if I break my femur.)
You don't need to pay for an extra device and carry it around.
Well I guess my comment was around the assertion that people would buy the Commercial service solely for emergencies, so in my view the PLB would fine if your use was only for Emergency Rescue.
If you need the other features then that makes a different argument but the original statement was that iPhone feature would kill these over devices because iPhone could be used to send emergency messages.
They mentioned a feature where your location could be sent via satellite in "find my" even in a non-emergency.
It looks it still takes some effort to send out a message with aiming and everything.
The findmy feature was in the press release. The aiming is probably only important for the sos case (sending the message immediately). Findmy can probably just update the location in the background whenever it gets a signal
Yes, findmy messages are store-and-forward. So the phone notices, "Huh, I saw something, when I was here, at this time, but I have no WiFi or cell signal" so it goes in a pile, and then a while later it has satellite, but still no WiFi or cell signal, so it sends out the pile.
I'm surprised it's worth doing this, I'd have expected that most findmy situations it's enough to get the pile of data hours or days later when somebody has Internet access again. Like, suppose I drop my airpods out of a pocket on some mountain trail on Saturday morning, a subsequent walker's iPhone sees them, but has no WiFi of course, however on Monday they're in the office, their iPhone reports it saw my airpods, X here at T time, and that's enough that I should be able (if I want) to go back and find them.
The place you might spend longer periods with only satellite is the open ocean, but basically if you lose shit in the ocean it's fucking gone.
Find My isn’t just Find My Stuff. It’s also Find My Friends and Find My Family Member.
The use case isn’t AirPods lost in the tundra it’s your husband or wife lost in the tundra.
Doesn't need to be that dramatic. Our Jeep got stuck in the Utah desert, and our guide had to pull out his Garmin satellite gadget to send a text message/coordinates for a friend to come pull us out. Lucky he had that thing. Yeah we could have hiked 3 miles over rugged terrain to a highway, but by the time we got there it would have been dark and we would have been exhausted. So we made the call. It wasn't life-or-death but it sure was convenient, saved us a lot of time, and allowed us to be back on schedule the next day. Definitely worth the investment. I'll be getting this iPhone for sure.
As others have noted it’s not clear if you can use an iPhone for that. It may well be emergency signal or nothing.
Good point. I did watch the keynote. SOS and Find My coordinates are the only explicitly specified use cases. But it's a paid service with the first 2 years free. I made the assumption you should be able to send text messages, because asking people to pay for a service that only lets you communicate with emergency services and that's all seems like a much less compelling product which is a bit un-Apple like. But then again, they have done lousy products before so it's possible they went with the less-compelling option.
Per a video someone else posted it seems there's communication with (probably just) emergency services which (for some use cases) is probably more useful than just a personal locator beacon.
For now! It would make sense for Apple to eventually own/manage a satellite fleet for global communication in the near future. The current carriers must be shitting their pants about this.
I'm not exactly sure what you're imagining, but there are fundamental physics problems in the way of just launching a bunch of satellites and enabling global communications.
Apple has partnered with Globalstar to use geostationary satellites to send incredibly small amounts of data measured in bytes, not kilobytes. These satellites have only limited bandwidth, and it's very expensive. And with the antenna size and power available in a phone today, it's never going to be more than kilobytes.
SpaceX Starlink/TMobile announced a much higher-bandwidth option, but it's incredibly fleeting, lasting just a few seconds.
Starlink satellites are in very low Earth orbit, moving at 8km/second. You can't just point an antenna at it and have it work. The antenna needs to track the satellite. And it needs to have a constant line of sight free of obstructions. Starlink currently builds a very cheap phased-array antenna, but it's still ~$1,000 to manufacture, it's a couple cubic feet in volume, and it uses >100 watts.
Starlink V2 will bring very large antennas to Starlink satellites which will enable direct 5G connectivity, but that connectivity will last for a few seconds, with perhaps thirty minutes between connections.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but no one knows how to build a satellite system currently that will cause any carriers to shit their pants.
Starlink V2 will bring very large antennas to Starlink satellites which will enable direct 5G connectivity, but that connectivity will last for a few seconds, with perhaps thirty minutes between connections.
It sounded like temporary connectivity was only initially; once they have a full shell of V2 satellites I would expect constant connectivity.
> Apple has partnered with Globalstar to use geostationary satellites
I haven't read the announcement, but Globalstar's constellation is in LEO.
Indeed. Until a few years ago I was also under the impression that the satellite phone constellations were geostationary or at least geosynchronous. I remember growing up in the 90s hearing about satellite phones and how they had a very noticeable delay, which I assumed meant they were way up there. But perhaps that was just an older generation of constellations, because Globalstar and Iridium (by far the most popular networks in use by consumer-grade devices) are definitely LEO.
inmarsat does sell a handheld satellite phone product (google "inmarsat isatphone") which uses narrow band data channels and handhelds to talk to geostationary satellites. Its coverage is not quite as solid or reliable as iridium, because you can be easily obstructed by a mountain on your south side if you're at latitude 45N or something, and doesn't extend beyond about 70 degrees north, but it's also priced cheaper than iridium for the hardware and the monthly service.
what most people think of as a satellite phone is indeed LEO since iridium has the lion's share of the market.
1400km, compared to 550km for Starlink.
Yeah but their satellites are basically oversized analogue relays. So bandwidth is bugger all with little capacity to increase it. So Leo or not it's like having CDMA speeds as your cap. Pretty much useless for anything other than a GPS location ping for emergency use.
The way technology is headed there is a 110% chance that the phased array tech gets miniaturized and put into a phone. And once the constellation is filled in, you’ll be able to find any tiny slice of sky and talk to a starlink sat that’s flying through it. Indoors is still a problem but who knows, things are always evolving.
You can't take say Moore's Law for chip tech and slap it on to radio tech. They're fundamentally different physical processes. There are limits to radio transmission and reception bandwidth and range due to the basic physics that you can't end run. The inverse square law is a harsh master, for any given level of technology a transmitter 100x closer is going to have a 10,000x advantage however you slice it.
What they might be able to do is expand this to something like limited texting, or maybe down the line even non-realtime voice messaging.
We are still able to have two-way communication with both Voyagers.
Google’s Lyra codec can already get down to 3Kb/s and be reasonably audible. It’s not a stretch to imagine within a few years we’ll be able to push that to below 1Kb/s.
Taking those two things together, I think it’s fairly reasonable to assume at least text and voice are within reach.
Stable diffusion, backwards on the device, targeting a photo. send photos with only the prompt.
Reminiscent of Vernor Vinge's "evocations", as mentioned in A Fire Upon the Deep:
> The screen showed a color image with high resolution. Looking at it carefully, one realized the thing was a poor evocation…. Kjet recognized Owner Limmende and Jan Skrits, her chief of staff, but they looked several years out of style. Ølvira [the ship] was matching old video with the transmitted animation cues. The actual communication channel was less that four thousand bits per second; Central was taking no chances.
> [...]
> The picture was crisp and clear, but when the figures moved it was with cartoonlike awkwardness. And some of the faces belonged to people Kjet knew had been transferred […] The processors here on the Ølvira were taking the narrow-band signal from Fleet Central, fleshing it out with detailed (and out of date) background and evoking the image shown.
Sounds a lot like DALL-E plus a finely tuned training database on both ends could create this sort super-compression if we wanted to. I could imagine having a crisp, real-time (But artificial) 4K video conference at a few kb/s.
Nvidia is already working on this.
The novel I'm quoting was written in 1992. :)
Sparse array fallacy. You can't make a phased array too small and have high directionality-- you lose all the power in the side lobes. This one's underlying physics.
You can't really shrink a phased array.
If you use smaller antenna elements you must use a higher frequency, and higher frequencies are more attenuated by the earth's atmosphere (generally, when you get to THz there is a window or else visible light wouldn't be able to penetrate) so they have no chance of making it to a satellite.
If you use less elements you lose all your gain in the side lobes, as the other commenter mentioned
Phased arrays are already in phones that have mm wave antennas ;) usually only 1 dimension though. But it's not inconceivable they will add one capable to reach a satellite. Obviously the number of elements and thus the gain will be lower than the one Ina starlink station. But with slower speeds you don't need as strong a signal.
> Apple has partnered with Globalstar to use geostationary satellites
globalstar's existing network and licenses have nothing to do with geostationary at all.
please don't comment on things like this if you have fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of different types of mutually incompatible satellite network technology.
If you are going to be pedantic, it would behoove you to use correct capitalization.
it's a well documented fact that typing in all lower case is very slightly faster for persons accustomed to it as a regular practice, which is a completely different thing than fundamentally misunderstanding the technical parameters of a L/S-band LEO vs geostationary data link, if we want to be pedantic about it.
Starlink is not going to be faster than this necessarily. Starlink is also low bandwidth, but has to be compatible with all phones. So they are not able to design hardware in the phone with a better antenna for this purpose as Apple can do.
> You can't just point an antenna at it and have it work. The antenna needs to track the satellite. And it needs to have a constant line of sight free of obstructions.
People already do this when communicating from the ground via amateur satellites on handheld radios. Here the fellow followed the sweep of the sky with his yagi.
https://youtu.be/jmCgIk8eVWw
The speeds Starlink will deliver are 2G speeds/device. They said 2-4Mbps/cell, and a cell is a wide area. I think it will have continuous coverage once the constellation reaches a certain size. AST SpaceMobile is planning 4g or 5g speeds/device with their 40 Gbps capable satellites.
not geosync, LEO.
Globalstar simplex only takes about 200 mW over 2 seconds to deliver a 72 byte message, into an antenna about 0 dBi gain. See the STX3 transmitter module.
That doesn't feel very efficient. 72 bytes is nothing.
72 bytes is more than your reply here.
They're funding a large amount of GlobalStar's future constellation, which seems like a pathway to ownership (if Globalstar goes under or apple can acquire without the debt burden)
Apple also funds much of TSMC's growth, without any pathway to ownership. Apple is likely just buying top priority.
Let's be real here, TSMC's growth is there with or without Apple.
It’s not obvious it would be had Apple not started pumping stratospheric amounts of money into them years ago. And they’re still pre-paying new fab development that TSMC might find it challenging to afford without them.
(Disclaimer: casual observer at best. May be misrepresenting what I’ve heard.)
That's not clear at all. TSMC's capability growth _started_ with Apple fabbing with them
Apple prefers to keep away from the downsides of actual ownership while having the upsides of being an only customer
Does anyone prefer to keep the downsides? The only thing stopping people is not having the cash to be able to do the same.
There are a number of companies that can goe toe-to-toe with Apple that don't have the same approach, even if they can afford to. Apple and Walmart are known to put the to put on thumbscrews on their suppliers more than fellow behemoths in their respective industries.
This makes me think it's less of an affordability issue, and more of where they fall along spectrum on amount of margin that can be squeezed from smaller suppliers.
They aren't.
https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-cove...
I'd also bet on Starlink to scale better than Globalstar (after they also own the fucking rockets). Add better features and innovate
They described the bandwidth as tens of seconds to minutes for sending single, short, compressed messages, with your phone aimed right at a satellite for the duration. This isn't the kind of network which you "roam" with.
Or the capacity of the network is really low.
According to Wikipedia they have 52 first-generation satellites from the late 90s, and 24 second-generation satellites from around 2010. And if we go by Iridium's lifetime I wouldn't expect the first generation to still be operational.
Compared to Starlink's 2400 currently operational satellites that does seem low. Even compared to Iridium's 75 from the late 2010s, Globalstar's 24 seems small.
It's the kind of 'low bandwidth' you'd see with analog telephone modems. A single JSON request-response over TLS would take many seconds.
Current generation globalstar is about the same speed as first gen iridium, which is around the speed of a 2400 bps dialup modem from the late 1980s.
With the current satellites, yes, if they think they have enough capital (at least many hundreds of millions) to launch a new clean sheet of paper design LEO network using the existing globalstar L/S-band spectrum licenses, they could implement something better.
The value of globalstar is not in the existing satellites and earth stations, which are pretty much trash at this point for any modern use except very low data rate M2M data in certain geographically restricted areas. The value is in the existing LEO network operational licenses.
Yep, similar value is found on other technically inept solutions that are mostly kept around to keep the license to operate active (since some of those require active use to retain them).
The mentioned in the announcement developing a very efficient data codec for text compression, I'd presume something Binary and not over TLS, just raw data packets probably with some encryption
Given that they're transmitting an app form over to Apple's server, they could encode checkboxes with bitmaps and text fields with dictionary LZMA. There probably will be only a few bytes of the actual data per emergency submission + protocol authentication and error correction overhead.
I'm sure the Apple use case is different from a web api, but it was more for illustrative purposes. I imagine most developers know how to wrap data in JSON and how to do a HTTP call over TLS. When using that as a point of reference, having such a transmission take a long time might show how little bandwidth some M2M networks have (or need).
I wouldn't be surprised if the current Globalstar network is so limited it wouldn't even do voice.
They support voice (https://www.globalstar.com/en-us/products/voice-and-data), it's my understanding that it's analog and not digital though, like a really narrowband landline phone call
That makes sense. Satphones are probably using that same super low symbol rate used by M2M.
Slightly apples-to-oranges comparison on the satellite count.
Unlike Globalstar, the Iridium network uses polar orbits which means they're covering a larger area and thus need more satellites to achieve comparable service in the limited latitudes that Globalstar covers.
(that being said, if you're going to be in mountainous terrain, higher latitudes, far from land, etc then Iridium will have better coverage)
>I wouldn't expect the first generation to still be operational
From Wikipedia:
>In 2007, Globalstar launched eight additional first-generation spare satellites into space to help compensate for the premature failure of their in-orbit satellites. Between 2010 and 2013, Globalstar launched 24 second-generation satellites in an effort to restore their system to full service.
So you're totally right.
They say 85% so it must be 17 out of 20, no?
Imagine a repeat of Hurricane Harvey, but this time people can request rescues via their iPhone’s satellite capability. That could generate a relatively high volume of traffic.
Many unprepared geeks are planning to do risky hikes after reading this
You do have to wonder at what point Apple decides they don't need Verizon, T-Mobile et. al. Maybe it's still a long ways off, but if you've gone through the effort of building relationships, hardware, software, etc to weave together a satellite network, why not just keep going down that path?
You're vastly underestimating the bandwidth required for cellular service. A starlink sat "cell" can do ~20gbit/sec (though I actually think real world performance will be massively lower). This covers hundreds of kilometres.
A single cell tower with 5G/4G is not far off doing that, per sector. And these cell towers can cover as little as 500m or less in dense urban areas. The problem is there are very real physics you come up against with this. We are really tapping out efficiency gains these days so the only option is more, higher frequency spectrum and much denser cell networks.
> A single cell tower with 5G/4G is not far off doing that, per sector.
Assuming you mean LTE when you say 4G, the per sector bandwidth is customarily an order of magnitude less than 20gbps. Even in the case of 5G, with sub-6Ghz anyway, you rarely will see above 15gbps. There’s only so many bits per second you can squeeze per megahertz and below 6Ghz the allocations there just isn’t enough available frequency. That’s why cell towers have gotten much closer together.
Where did I mention only sub 6GHz? With mmWave towers are comfortably pushing around 20gig. 4G (LTE) and 5G have similar bits/Hz loadings anyway.
And towers are getting closer together. You reduce transmit/receive power and place the towers closer, which results in similar coverage but less interference between cells (with reduced power output).
> Where did I mention only sub 6GHz?
When you mentioned 4G in the same statement. The highest I’ve ever seen for a LTE tower in the US (I’ve been in 49 states and checked via field test equipment in multiple areas of each state, yes, I’m that nerd) was under 5gbps. LTE sectors more commonly are in the 1-2gbps range. As to 5G, sub 6Ghz it’s possible to get close to 20gbps air rate, but you need an very wide channel to do so (have to do the math, but I think >100mhz of spectrum) and I’m not aware of any US carriers doing so (but they could be). If we are talking the rare unicorn mmWave, the one with less than 1% of all US cell towers supporting, sure, 20gbps is common. Twice that isn’t unheard of either.
Long story short, we are violently agreeing both before and now. It’s just nuances we are both dinging the other for. Cheers!
>You're vastly underestimating the bandwidth required for cellular service.
No, I’m really not, that’s why I put the caveat about maybe not today, but big rivers have a way of starting as a small trickle.
Even if radio tech improved so much, big fewer cellular towers can provide better service cheaper than satellites.
If anything I see increased convergence between connectivity methods not any one technology supplanting another. Making your service plan able to connect the user from Wi-Fi + Celluar + Satellite when they are indoors, in a dense area, or far away will be able to deliver a far greater experience than locking into any single technology both in coverage and performance.
We already see this kind of thing already with T-Mobile + Starlink, Home internet providers bundling phone plans and allowing you to roam to other networks, traditional cellphone providers hopping on board Wi-Fi calling support, and Apple + Globalstar.
My guess for Apple’s long game is is to turn the Find My network into a distributed network for comms beyond location data.
One of the incentives to participate may be free or reduced-cost satellite data.
Not sure how much else they could do with it. You need to wave your phone around at the sky to send a few bytes of data. It must just be a really low capacity network.
Apple has apparently used a very very high gain (i.e. highly directional) antenna. That's how they got around having that big external antenna found on competitive hand-helds.
I quite like the idea of aiming it by hand using software as the guide.
Those large external antennas are high gain. Gain is a function of antenna area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_(antenna)#Effective_a...
Apple's antenna can only be smaller if it's lower gain. I would bet they're making that tradeoff because they don't need as much bandwidth. (Emergency pings could be measured in dozens of bytes, let alone kilobytes or megabytes.)
The Aperture and Gain section of that article says that gain refers to the directivity of an antenna
> antennas with large effective apertures are considered high-gain antennas (or beam antennas), which have relatively small angular beam widths.
I wonder if there could be a bluetooth (or connected) high gain antenna attachment for the new iphone they could sell as accessory.
None of the RF ports come out to a connector so no that couldnt really work.
You CAN get high gain antennas for things like your WiFi router, it's my goto when an elderly relative complains about their wifi range.
You can't actually increase power with an (inactive) antenna but you CAN change it's radiation pattern. The higher gain omnidirectional antennas just take a radiation pattern that looks like a sphere (0dB gain) and squashes it into a donut shape. So you get more range laterally around the antenna at the expense of less above and below it
Maybe Globalstar needs a big antenna, but Iridium doesn’t. I have a Garmin InReach with a 1 inch antenna and it works fine without any antenna pointing antics.
I'd rather have no exposed antenna, no subscription fees and no separate device.
For emergencies, having to point at the sky isn't a big deal.
But it IS a big deal!
There’s been a lot of research into emergency UX. Basically, it needs to be dead simple or people die. In an emergency, people are usually panicked, injured or in shock. The tool needs to do its thing simply and effortlessly to cut through the panic and confusion of a real emergency. I have an avalanche transponder that is one big button because when you friend just got buried under 20 tons of snow and rocks, you have the leftover brain for one button.
From the demo, I think Apple is very aware of this which is why they give you a series of canned prompts. They’ve probably already used up a significant cognitive load by having you point the phone for signal that having you type as well was considered dangerous.
There's also the fact that canned prompts use dramatically less data.
Note SOS service is just free for 2 years.
> I have a Garmin InReach with a 1 inch antenna and it works fine
Your definition of the word “fine” is apparently rather generous. Be in an actual emergency situation and the InReach is down right frustrating as hell, but “better than nothing”. I don’t have optimism for Apple’s offering either for the record.
It's a bit slow to get a message out, but at least you can send a message. A traditional PLB might be faster but you can't transmit anything so the responders know zero about your situation. What the problem is, where you are exactly, how urgent it is, etc. I'll take InReach any day.
> It's a bit slow to get a message out, but at least you can send a message.
Tell that to a someone I know who had a broken leg and not only was the location way off, it took multiple hours to send. He was around a half mile of a well trodden hiking path too, so help took no time to get there once the message was actually broadcast (while the location was way off, he was visible from that wrong location). He wishes he’d had a loud whistle instead.
> I'll take InReach any day.
I’ll take my Inmarsat based phone any day. Sure, the monthly fee is 1.5x higher, but I know my message AND my call will go through as long as I have a clear view of the sky.
Ok I didn't realize it worked that badly sometimes :( For me it has always sent them within a couple of minutes.
I had a GEO satphone myself (Thuraya which is really cheap for airtime in Europe) before but as I hike through the mountains it's very hard to get a line of sight. So I didn't deem it useful enough for emergency.
Maybe I'll get a PLB too then, I'll think about it.
> I had a GEO satphone myself (Thuraya which is really cheap for airtime in Europe) before but as I hike through the mountains it's very hard to get a line of sight. So I didn't deem it useful enough for emergency.
Yeah, the iSatPhone2 is fairly forgiving on line of sight as long as you aren’t in a canyon or hiking up the north face of a mountain. Given they are in geosynchronous orbit, targeting is much easier (just point antenna south). My iridium I had back in the late 00’s was a PITA to get signal on a hike where we had to call for an air ambulance for emergency evac.
I see, the Thuraya had a bit of a hard time because it has only 1 sat covering Europe and it's all the way over Saudi Arabia. So it's not only up a long way but also quite far away geographically. I guess this is why it's so cheap in Europe (2 years airtime - not including calls - was about 40 euro IIRC, whereas with Iridium you would pay more than that every month!)
So it was a bit tricky to reach the sat especially in hilly or built up areas.
Modern PLBs send your location to both LEOSAR, MEOSAR and GEOSAR, as well as 121.5MHz homing signal for SAR responders that need to find you exact location (since you might not even have good GPS signal or GPS signal at all if you're in a canyon for example).
I've been using PLB for years and unless I'll only switch to Garmin InReach if I really need to communicate with people back home. Yes, it can be very handy, not just for that, but also to communicate with other fellow thruhikers in ways other than trail registers, but in some cases LEO might not be good enough for sending distress signal.
Could you recommend a PLB model? Like the other poster I didn't realize InReach can take hours sometimes. When I've tested it, it was always fast (not immediate but a couple minutes max)
I have the ACR ResQLink 375. It's the second one I own, the previous one I lost in the Pyrenees (attached it to by shoulder straps in a bad way and could not hear it fall due to the winds). The reason I mention it is that NOAA (which register each device) were extremely responsive when I reported it to them in case: 1. It somehow activates. 2. In case someone finds it and report back to them (they agreed to inform me if that happens).
While it might have been possible for me to retrieve it (I spent a day searching it) if it were a tracker device (such as InReach), I found that even if you find a Garmin device, Garmin support won't disclose any details about its owner or contact them on your behalf. I'm not sure if for privacy or commercial reasons but I just found it awkward (I didn't find a device myself, but learned about it through Garmin support forums).
If I were to buy a new PLB today, I would have considered the newer models with Return Link Service (such as ResQLink 410 RLS). It doesn't let you communicate, but notifies you that your distress signal has been delivered to.
Just read the other comment. While I guess hours response is an outlier in clear sky conditions, I really wish that Garmin would have made stats publicly available
Thanks for the feedback! I didn't realise or even consider these aspects of lost devices etc. I live near (well, sort of) near the Pyrenees and I walk through similar areas.
Because I already owned the InReach (I also used it as a backup for business travel in "less than safe" areas) I never really looked at PLBs. I will look at the ACR range. The prices look pretty OK considering the InReach has a fairly high monthly cost and these don't.
Want to know another great safety measure that only costs you around $100 w/ no monthly fee? Pick up a handheld ham radio. When you enter areas with rangers, stop and ask the emergency frequency they use.
Best to get a HAM license to be safe (it’s trivially easy to pass the General exam), but if you are only using it in an actual emergency, I highly doubt anyone will judge you too harshly for not having it.
> While I guess hours response is an outlier in clear sky conditions
It definitely is an outlier, maybe partially due to conditions (I wasn’t there, just was someone who received the other party’s messages way late), but that’s the point. An emergency situation is already an outlier as is, the last thing I want is to trust a device which has a definite probability of failure again. Screw “me” over once, shame on you. Twice? Shame on me.
> Apple has apparently used a very very high gain (i.e. highly directional) antenna. That's how they got around having that big external antenna found on competitive hand-helds.
> I quite like the idea of aiming it by hand using software as the guide.
In the event of an emergency, fumbling with my phone to find service sounds like a nightmare.
I don't know what the current state of the art is, but it sounds considerably easier to use than old satellite phones. Plus you don't have to lug around a satellite phone.
It sounds worse than current dedicated emergency beacons (which afaik usually are both satellite uplink and lower-frequency beacon), and I'd expect many/most people using them today will continue to carry them. But many people don't, and even if you do it is another fallback.
The best camera is the one you have with you, and no-one[*] carries around an SLR camera these days.
Similarly, the best emergency-alert system is the one you have with you. Apple is playing the long game, getting their feet wet in a new area, and providing some value. They will iterate, it's what they do.
[1] For some definition of "no-one". Obviously some people do carry around SLR's but it's a tiny minority.
Isn't that pretty much what I said?
I carry an InReach mini in my airplane when flying over wilderness areas. Unfortunately I don’t think I could trust the iPhone. With the Garmin you can press one button and it’ll send out an emergency beacon without having to aim it.
Where are you flying out of curiosity? Flying over sparsely populated areas of rockies in Colorado, I very frequently have cell service. Having said that, nothing wrong with being prepared, I'm just curious about your situation. I might start doing that too. I always figured if I actually went down, landing would be the hard part, not staying alive once I landed.
Those full bars of coverage you had at altitude are probably going to disappear the moment you lose line-of-sight.
That said, aircraft have ELTs which are supposed to trigger on impact and can be manually activated as well, so an InReach probably wouldn't make a life-or-death difference very often.
Utah and Nevada, for the most part.
There are lots of great places to land, but being stuck in the desert without any way to communicate is a very real possibility (Ironically, even at many small town airports I’ve landed at).
Of course that's the hard part. But if you do survive the landing you'll be very glad you have communications available :)
To be fair I barely trust my InReach either. Overcast days, canyons, and any kind of tree cover consistently result in delayed or failed messages. And even if they report as "sent" on the device sometimes the recipient doesn't get them.
And for a dedicated device, the tracking feature is laughably bad with worse accuracy than my friend's watch.
Better than nothing in case of emergency but the reliability leaves a lot to be desired.
Are the messaging and emergency functions the same with those? For emergency beacons there is also a ~400Mhz frequency that is monitored independently (vs satellite communication at higher frequencies)
InReach uses the same 16xx Mhz Iridium frequency for everything. It does not have a 400Mhz PLB transmitter (which usually come with extendable antennas by the way, due to the ~ 70cm wavelength).
I would guess this feature is more for hikers, etc. who wouldn't really want to carry extra things if they could avoid it.
Even if it is a little worse, NO ONE is shelling out $600 for an InReach after this announcement. I am an avid backpacker who has resisted SatComs (partly for the price, partly because they ruin the experience maaaaan) and I can tell you with certainty that this put to bed any last chance of me purchasing an InReach
> In the event of an emergency, fumbling with my phone to find service sounds like a nightmare.
It doesn't have to be perfect, compared to the current alternative of 1) Having nothing to fumble around or 2) Be one of the few people with a full on expensive satellite phone I think it's a valuable addition.
Similar to how Chase Jarvis said "the best camera is the one you always have with you", this is also the case for emergency equipment.
The other option is 3) a satelite distress beacon, but most people don’t have them
If you’re in the middle of nowhere and have an emergency where seconds count, you’re dead anyway. This is the difference between rescue in 2 hours and 2 days (or even 2 weeks). Spending 5 minutes finding the transmitter isn’t a problem if you’re stuck with a broken leg. If you’re struggling to control critical bleeding or are doing CPR and are on your own (thus you can’t spend the 5 minutes finding a signal) then you’re screwed anyway.
In my state, emergency services point out that if you use an emergency locator such as a Garmin, you should expect that it may be a couple of days before rescue comes anyway. It depends on exactly where you are, of course.
Matthew Power and his expedition had a proper kit, satellite phone, etc.
They tried getting helicopter evacuation but even that took hours he didn’t have.
But it will probably reduce the number of casual pranksters.
Also, difficult-to-use is better than zero connectivity, which is the current situation.
The tens of thousands billed for a frivolous rescue request probably will stop the casual pranksters too, getting a helicopter out to wherever you're stuck isn't a free service. If you're really out in remote places often, you probably know this well enough to get rescue insurance.
Actually it depends. In Canada, many rescue services are free (North Shore Vancouver is a well known one here) as well as in the National Parks (the cost is essentially insurance paid for by the park pass fee) and many provincial parks.
There is an argument that pay for rescue causes people to hesitate to call and that can lead to worse outcomes and/or more dangerous rescue scenarios.
There is also an argument that free rescues lead to reckless behavior and worse outcomes, because if the worst happens you can always get a chopper to pick you up….
In my state, the bill will be in the five or six figures -- but if you were legitimately in real danger, they will usually opt not to charge you. If you called them by mistake or as a prank, you'll pay.
And rescue insurance would not cover pranks either by the way. So be careful :)
Apparently it works with Find My as well. I wouldn't be surprised if they started rolling out premium features that take more bandwidth once everybody's free two years expires.
This is it right here! The "emergency" part is a feel-good on top of the real service, which is location updates every X time even when off in no cell service land.
"every X time" meaning as often as you're willing to point your phone at a satellite and wait a few minutes for your location to transmit?
That I don’t know - I could see it trying to send a signal every five minutes and hoping some get through.
I doubt it. Thats a great way to murder your battery in the wilderness
Yea this must be the main feature. And is pretty huge. The emergency thing is icing on the cake.
Unfortunately GlobalStar is probably one of the worst satellite constellations out there (that I know of at least) for actual communication (SPOT devices used or still use GlobalStar and are famously crap compared to Garmin inReach on Iridium). Of course it could be improved and they do have the bandwith licenses which is important.
Globalstar, Inc. Mkt cap 3.71B.
Do I have to be the angry parent with the shotgun or are Apple going to make an honest woman out of Globalstar and just buy them. There is probably enough down the back of the sofa at cuppertino to cover it.
While we are at it someone might want to check Apple employee stock portfolios ... that is a strong 80% straight line rally in a bear market the last few months after they announced their profit margins were -72% in June
It wouldn't actually be smart to buy Globalstar, if Apple did they're on the hook for that 3.71B + the cost theyd spend on those messages.
This way they pay a relatively minute fee and can have a guarantee they can use Globalstar's existence to compete with others on with price. So they not only don't spend 3.71B they won't get back, the cost of those messages is relatively nothing and easy to compete on with others - for what is a commoditised service. They'd also force Globalstar to spend all that cash theyd get from Apple on their capex, at no risk to Apple.
Almost a similar reason to outsource to Foxconn vs buy them and have it in house.
Fair, given the 36.8mil of revenue for Globalstar, the annual deal for apple is going to be around that number, actual pocket change.
I do disagree however, that global satellite coverage is a commoditised service just yet.
> Do I have to be the angry parent with the shotgun or are Apple going to make an honest woman out of Globalstar and just buy them.
So the way to make an “honest woman” is to force somebody “to marry her at gunpoint” you say? The previous century called and would like their antiquated statements back. I’m sure you didn’t mean to be sexist, just pointing out the obvious about how bad that phrase is these days.
You can boycott a 2022 film with your outrage at the antiquated out of use phrase then. You can add to the offended people complaining about how inappropriate Amazon Studios productions are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_Wedding_(2022_film)
It's a great feature worth a lot of money to US law enforcement and co. Being able to track anyone regardless if they have cell signal. /s
There’s 1B iPhone users. If 10% upgrade to a 14 pro and over the course of a few years that will ramp
You are correct - the keynote mentioned that location sharing is also available over satellite.
You have to consider that Apple is selling 200 million iPhones per year.
iPhone does not have a directional antenna. It will take enormous amount of power on satellite to communicate to it.
This is one thing that worries me about the feature. If you're stuck in the middle of nowhere with no coverage, presumably no power outlets..., is attempting to transmit a message going to work if you're sitting at 5% battery left?
The timing of the Starlink/T-Mobile pre-announcement makes sense now.
And a lot more attractive. An addition subscription for a hard to use SOS vs 3G data speeds for "free" for many T-Mobile customers.
I will also say one is vaporware at this point and one is coming out next week.
SpaceX's offering is not 3G data speeds per user. It's 3G data speed shared between all users in a "cell". Current Starlink cells are 150 square miles. Which requires drastically limiting what users can use it for to avoid overwhelming the satellites. Initially they will only allow text messages (not just SMS though, they plan to support certain messaging apps). Maybe voice calls in the future.
But yeah, SpaceX's offering is going to be better if it works as advertised. Doesn't require buying a new phone. Doesn't require holding your phone pointing in a particular direction for minutes at a time. Can be used for any purpose, not just emergencies.
There's also ATS SpaceMobile which is similar to what SpaceX is doing but plans to use much bigger antennas on the satellites to offer higher bandwidth, enabling general data service rather than just SMS or voice. But they're a little farther out than SpaceX.
Tmobile Starlink is text only. It definitely does not support 3G data speeds.
They've stated it can do 2-4Mbps per cell region, which actually is 3G speeds if you're the only person in the region.
In practice not 3G speeds, but still much better than what this Apple / Globalstar service will be capable of.
There are often way more than 4 million people within 150 miles of populated cities in the States (which consequently is also a large portion of the population). For many people 2-4mbps per cell is less than 1 bps which I think is unreal.
My guess is their estimates are off and that satellite net speeds don’t correlate directly to regular network speeds because of all the other factors. If it’s actually 2-4Mbps… yikes, this would only be useful when you’re far away from populated areas (which in all reality could be their intended use case)
Only using it in very remote areas that literally have no other communications available is exactly the point of the T-Mobile/Starlink service. Obviously they're not trying to outperform terrestrial cellular networks with satellite comms. So mostly the same use-case as the Apple/Globalstar service.
Except from the sounds of it the Apple service actually is something like 1bps, since they stated in the video it can take "only" 15 seconds to send one message. (assuming an emergency SOS message size of 15 bytes when compressed)
You're not going to connect to a satellite while you're in a city. Only when you're in a middle of nothing and that's the whole point.
iPhone 14 users will enjoy both though right?
tmobile iphone 14 users are about to be the most connected people on the planet
Lacking a SIM card so I would say no.
They lack a physical SIM, still have up to 8 eSIMs. What difference does it make for using T-Mobile?
How the hell is this going to work? Starlink upgrade to beam down cellular signals?
That's black magic.. software defined radio finally finds its niche.
It's not magic; there are three companies doing LTE from space. On the satellite side it requires new hardware including a massive antenna.
Starlink v2 satellites are being outfitted with giant (25 m^2) phased array antennae for this purpose, which they will use to communicate with normal cellular antennas in the PCS spectrum range (~1.9GHz)
Adding a larger antennae adds more operational risk, does it not?
While I wish it was Iridium I guess it sort of makes sense. Out of all the GMDSS satellite provider Globalstar had the weakest offshore coverage. It appears they focus on the probably more popular land based coverage rather than true global open water coverage. Iridium probably has more expensive product for true global coverage.
Globalstar having "weak" offshore and truly global coverage is because the present globalstar architecture is a bent pipe, a satellite needs to be simultaneously in view of a globalstar-run earth station and the end user terminal (handheld phone, data modem module with antenna, etc).
Globalstar in the serious two way satellite business has been a joke for 15+ years, everyone who needs something serious that'll work anywhere on the planet has implemented solutions with Iridium, or something else geostationary based for low data rate (inmarsat isatphone, if not needed for very high latitude services). Or of course the wide array of different types of Inmarsat medium speed much more costly data terminals for briefcase-size folding (BGAN terminals, etc), ground vehicles, ships and aviation.
One of the Inmarsat 3rd party RF/modem partners is now making a data terminal for the medium sized UAV market which is about 3.5 pounds of stuff total including the antenna and good for 200-300 kbps of data, albeit at a typically high inmarsat $ per MB cost.
Or with small ku/ka-band self aiming vsat terminals in radome (commonly seen on ships), which get costly, which are quickly having their market eaten by starlink's much higher speeds and lower costs.
The value of globalstar at this point is probably in its spectrum licenses and legal entity's ability to operate, which given sufficiently deep pockets in capital resources, can be replaced with much newer and better tech in the L/S-band satellite-to-phone RF segment. I would bet good money that the people who are bankrolling this believe that they now have reliable access to two things:
a) relatively low $/kilogram cost for launches to LEO on some spacex competitor
b) low cost per unit mass production of satellites in an assembly line fashion, much as starlink satellites are currently churned out in large quantities.
Obviously they now know that what Motorola designed in 1997 for satellite-to-satellite data links in the same orbital plane for Iridium was the right way to go, I'd be shocked if a replacement Globalstar network did not implement a more modern version of the same. Same general idea as spacex's beta satellite-to-satellite laser links.
In the defense contractor/military/DoD world I have literally never seen a Globalstar terminal in use for anything anybody cares about. The only globalstar phones I've seen were in the hands of the staff of enthusiastic-but-utterly-telecom-clueless international aid NGOs, which not surprisingly completely failed to work in the location where they were trying to use them. They ended up packing them back into their boxes, putting them in a closet and buying Iridium handhelds.
Here's a CURRENT globalstar coverage map:
https://www.globalstar.com/Globalstar/media/Globalstar/Image...
The part in the filing that says this:
> Partner has agreed to make certain payments to the Company for (i) 95% of the approved capital expenditures Globalstar makes in connection with the new satellites described
I translate this as meaning that they intend to forklift upgrade the entire network to something that they think can reasonably compete with Iridium (and now SpaceX/Starlink) in addition to other regional players like Thuraya, and also of course Inmarsat.
Apple figured out how to effectively buy a satellite network without inheriting their pile of debt! What happens to the apple funded satellites if Globalstar goes under, is there some special clause that moves them directly to Apple?
If Apple really does acquire, I hope they ditch the bent pipe architecture, work on sat-to-sat connection, and most importantly for us, allow 2-way messaging on phones from sat, enough to send photos and stuff.
No. The terms seem designed to have the fallback option be for Apple to purchase the company outright, or possibly to purchase at least a controlling interest.
They have rules requiring the current Executive Chairman to retain majority control for 5 years. They have a right of first offer with him if he wants to sell stock.
With the company they have the right to submit a counteroffer to any sale of assets required to provide the services, or proposed sales of the company itself.
All of this makes me feel that they want to have this company as an independent supplier, but have buying it up as their backup plan.
Globalstar is a terrible asset and has limbered along for 15 years. The fact that they would give up almost all their capacity without even calling for an acquisition speaks to their desperation, perhaps even Apple's
Those radio band licenses though are the real value here
I am actually quite surprised that it hasn't gone fully belly up some time in the past 10-12 years as their product has been eclipsed by much more robust offerings from competitors. How they've limped along with additional funding I truly don't know.
> Global customer segments include oil and gas, government, mining, forestry, commercial fishing, utilities, military, transportation, heavy construction, emergency preparedness, and business continuity as well as individual recreational users.
From wikipedia.
Their customers seem to be pretty phone-call heavy industries, they aren't competitive on the data front, but aren't they cheaper than Iridium for phone calls?
Their satellite phones are absolutely ancient and look like 90s era Nokia. If voice was their competitive advantage you would assume they would invest heavily in keeping the equipment current. Looking at their service plans[0] I don't see anything compelling that matches Iridium or Inmarsat.
[0] https://www.globalstar.com/en-us/service-plans
Maybe they're the AOL dial-up of satellite phones? Surviving off legacy customers with minimal requirements who don't want to switch to something new.
If one looks at the past 10 years of revenue and company size as a whole of Globalstar, it's absolutely minuscule as a corporate entity, apple could buy them on a casual whim.
It turns out that long-range sat-to-sat connections are actually really hard to do. SpaceX hasn't figured them out yet, and neither has any other LEO provider. The people who have figured them out are at MEO and higher, where you can have fewer satellites and they can be a lot more expensive, and they don't have any tricks: they just throw money and power at the problem.
They were figured out in ka band rf for iridium 24+ years ago, just at not very high data rates. For quite some period of time the entire iridium network worldwide talked to terrestrial networks in only two locations, Hawaii and Arizona.
I'm not sure what you mean by meo operators figuring them out because the only current noteworthy meo operator is o3b and their satellites are bent pipe architecture.
Oneweb satellites, which is presently an incomplete network, also do not implement satellite to satellite data links.
What do you mean “SpaceX hasn’t figured them out yet”? ISL is live already.
TIL - the first ones with production inter-satellite links came 2 months ago.
Bird to bird in MEO in this type of constellations also benefits from lower relative speed/doppler shift between parties involved in the network.
Globalstar was a joke, not because of its architecture, but because its satellites got irradiated and degraded to the point they couldn’t handle a phone-call even in their on-shore/near-shore use case.
Nobody is going to invest in satellite phones or credits for a provider that couldn’t do space right.
An interesting alternative to sat comms is HF-DL if you don’t care for security. Cool to see all the Russia seized and reregistered jetliner equipment pinging and hearing HF-DL stations around the world on ACARS. Slow though, 300-1200bps.
Various ham radio data modes for 1200 bps or approximately that speed can be implemented with big ass dipole and yagi uda antennas for directional data links, with standard crypto libraries between Linux systems operating as serial bridge, it's just very very slow. And it's a gargantuan pile of equipment and huge antenna compared to something like iridium.
How did they survive with such a degraded service, who is still using them when there are alternatives? Were they competitive back when they launched, but just couldn't fund maintenance? Iridium also had severe financial problems but their own constellation and services are still pretty reliable (all things considered), so I'm curious!
They survived primarily on machine to machine telemetry data services.
Yep, these don't need instantaneous transfer so things can buffer it, and they're probably already installed ...
The transponders that ran their “simplex” services were unaffected, so they continued operating that service like normal.
Can't imagine that the emergency SOS functionality will use 85% of their network, so it has to be other uses. The Find My functionality certain is one possible use case that they've discusses, but it's not clear when/how that will be used. Might be a "push to send location" manual function (which would take hardly any data), or it could be automagic (sending every X minutes when no cell service available).
Though I suspect there is more coming. Once the launch settles down, I wouldn't be surprised that with Apple's announcement of the service cost (beyond the initial free 2 years)... that something like 2 way messaging becomes available. To any iMessage compatible user, of course. As part of the paid feature set.
> or it could be automagic (sending every X minutes when no cell service available).
It wouldn't be automatic. If you watch the reveal today, they show how they avoided adding in a satellite antenna: it's communications to a satellite is weak and requires manually holding up the phone pointed at a specific direction (it appears the iPhone keeps an offline copy of ephemeris data so it knows where the satellites are located and can tell you exactly where to point).
Globalstar also has spectrum and the capability to have ancillary terrestrial ground systems. Apple could just buy them now and roll out its own cell network.
> Partner has agreed to make certain payments to the Company for (i) 95% of the approved capital expenditures Globalstar makes in connection with the new satellites described
The real secret that will be studied in business school for decades to come is Apple's supplier model.
Having trouble understanding this. Why is it special that the supply model be studied?
Their strategy uniquely gives you the upside of internal R&D (pace, funding, and direction are set by you) with none of the downside (potential disruption by new technologies). Apple can drop a supplier on a dime if a disruptive technology comes out. If that same tech was being developed in house, there would have been too much internal politics and momentum for that switch to happen. But because they bankroll capex, they have control over the direction and pace of incremental R&D.
They are able to swoop in and lock up supply better than any company and turn the screws on them to produce exactly what Apple needs.
Note that Tim Cook and Jeff Williams the COO and Tim's right hand human, spent their entire careers before senior leadership managing Apple's supply chain.
I believe Apple is going to - either acquire Globalstar or a similar satellite carrier (Lynk?) in the future. It's safe to buy stocks of the former.
I mean, there is this clause in the 8k:
“On September 7, 2022, Partner and Thermo entered into a lock-up and right of first offer agreement that generally (i) requires Thermo to offer any shares of Globalstar common stock to Partner before transferring them to any other Person other than affiliates of Thermo and (ii) prohibits Thermo from transferring shares of Globalstar common stock if such transfer would cause Thermo to hold less than 51.00% of the outstanding common stock of the Company for a period of 5 years from the Service Launch (as defined below). This agreement does not prohibit the Company from entering into a change of control transaction at any time.”
For reference:
"Partner" is Apple
"the Company" is Globalstar
Thermo is a VC company
Seems highly likely, acquiring Globalstar that is. Having one customer account for 85% of your business, however you want to count that, is extremely risky.
I had a previous employer who would get concerned when one customer accounted for 20%+ of revenue. You can sort of fix this by increasing revenue, but Globalstar sold 85% of capacity, for a resource that is expensive and difficult to increase. The upside is that many customers will want to be on the same service as Apple, so that might help grow their business.
Or hedge their bets by buying a right of first refusal option from Globalstar should anyone else try to acquire them while leaving Apple free to look for other options and partners.
The feature is sold as a two year free subscription to the service, not a feature of the device. That suggests to me Apple isn't committed to this forever. They want do be able to abandon the technology and human staffed relay infrastructure if this is eclipsed by satellite 5G or some other option and not get sued in 195 countries for breaking a device feature after the sale.
I don't read this as lack of commitment, I read this as "we want to keep a limit on the total number of active devices" - if it's free for two years then there will be a moderate percentage that always have it because they refresh their device every two years or less, there will be a significantly smaller percentage that use an older device and choose to pay the ongoing fee, and a much larger percentage that keep the device longer than two years but don't pay the fee. This last category is how they'll effectively manage the ongoing costs - anyone who isn't a frequent customer or willing to pay is excluded. It's a solid model.
> That suggests to me Apple isn't committed to this forever.
Apple TV+ is also offered as 1 year free service when you buy a new phone, then you can also say the same about it, but - in fact - needless to say, Apple is committed to it.
Only once, not for every phone. So if you get it once, buying another phone won't renew it. And now it's only 3 months.
Can someone please explain how this company is still in business with huge losses for years?!
Probably get some call options on Globalstar on an easy bounce.
Box out competition.
The title is misleading. The filing doesn’t say Apple will “use” 85%.
The actual filing says
“Allocate 85% of its current and future network capacity to support the Services (see further discussion of capacity below)”
This could simply be that Apple is buying up the bulk of the capacity to box out competitors from offering same functionality.
Just like what they do with TSMC.
I'm pretty sure Apple uses the TSMC capacity they pay for. To do otherwise would be financial mismanagement.
I am curious how the payment of this service works.
Apple doesn't mention any additional payment necessary for this feature. But clearly GlobalStar is being compensated heavily by Apple to allocate 85% of their capacity to them. So my question is, who flips the bill? Is Apple paying out of the goodness of their hearts (more realistically as a loss leader to sell more iPhones), or is Apple forcing the carriers like AT&T and Verizon to kick-back a portion of the monthly bill (maybe $1-$2 per user) to GlobalStar for coverage.
I suspect it is the latter, which is why we only see this feature available in select markets. Those are probably the markets where Apple has required all its iPhone carriers to agree to this payment.
Somehow GlobalStar gets paid and its not coming from the end-users (not directly at least).
During the announcement apple mentioned that this comes with iphone 14 for free for 2 years. So possibly apple just thinks there's huge opportunity for growth here
Probably an incentive for people to upgrade every two years instead of lingering to 3+ years for phone upgrades.
Is Apple paying out of the goodness of their hearts (more realistically as a loss leader to sell more iPhones)
Apple doesn’t do loss leaders.
What if a small percentage of Apple’s service revenue has been set aside for this very reason?
A quick check of the latest financial statements shows Apple’s service revenue through 3 quarters was about $60 billion.
I think you can pay for satellite bandwidth with that kind of money. ;-)
the announcement says that the SOS feature is only available for free for 2 years after purchase. I am speculating that Apple will bill customers directly for satellite feature subscriptions.
Sounds like those of us on a 2 year upgrade cycle will get it for free then.
However, I'd expect them to roll it into Apple's aggregated services packages too at an economical price, an Apple One Premier + Satellite SOS, if you will.
I agree; that’s probably how they’re going to proceed.
Presumably it's included in the cost of the device. They cost several hundreds dollars.
Next thing Apple should offer is rescue insurance. I have a SPOT X and pay a bit more for rescue insurance if I call through them.
SOS button is great, but it’s definitely tempered if that helicopter extraction costs you $30k
I'm surprised this feature is provided by Globalstar. That network is, as the name says, global so why limit the feature to the US and Canada?
Actually GlobalStar has some of the weakest satellite coverage in the satellite market. It covers North America and Austrailia very thoroughly. But only covers other continents partially. It covers 3/4 of South America, only western Europe, and only really covers Japan and Singapore in Asia. There is almost no ocean coverage.
The Iridium network (which is what Garmin uses) covers nearly everything outside of the north and south poles. This includes all the oceans and basically all habitable land. That is why Iridium has dominated the satellite market for so many years over GlobalStar. Garmin satellite devices (like InReach) uses Iridium. But they also have non-trivial costs associated with that coverage.
As someone who has used these satellite communicators for years, don't get your hopes up on using these all the time like an extension of your phone. Sending messages over satellite is painfully slow, even with devices with advanced helix antennas (which the iPhone doesn't have). It can take minutes to send a single text message. Phone communicators sometimes have 20-30+ second lag in them.
I have InReach and yeah I know it's not fast. It's fine for what it is though. I'm not going to have deep conversations on it.
I didn't realize Globalstar was that bad though. I knew it wasn't great due to the bent pipe network which precludes signals far out at sea etc. I've seen several hikers with Spot devices and they didn't seem unhappy with them. Mostly Americans though.
But yeah then I can imagine.
Actually Iridium has really great coverage of the poles due to the planes running north/south.
global so why limit the feature to the US and Canada
Nearly all Apple services are available only in the US and Canada to start; this is nothing new.
I’m sure Europe and Asia are next.
Well, they need relay services to integrate with the local emergency services
True but that's already available in Europe too. Globalstar spot works in Europe just fine.
And it's not just for emergency either, also for find my.
Let’s think three moves ahead here. Apple starts off with this good-publicity, peace-of-mind emergency service, gets a bunch of practice testing the technology in real-world situations, iterates and tweaks for a couple years, and then maybe in 2026 there’s a version of the iPhone that can use satellite communication for everyday non-emergency purposes.
Especially if they get on the Starlink train rather than using Globalstar.
When you say everyday non-emergency purposes, do you mean phone calls and full internet access?
Maybe iMessage? A phone that can always, 100% of the time get messages out would literally be a lifesaver.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalstar
9,600 bit/s packet switched Internet access (Direct Internet) 9,600 bit/s circuit switched data calls (Direct Dial-Up)
That's probably under ideal conditions.
That's when you have an actual satellite antenna on the grown tho, not whatever underpowered antenna they're using in iPhone 14.
1 bit/second is enough to save someone’s life in an emergency.
APPL pays for new HW to replace their infra
I remember when Iridium and Globalstar filed for bankruptcy. How the time spins.
Reminiscent of how google maps (on cellphones) killed standalone GPS trackers, this may hurt Garmin InReach type devices quite a bit, not that there is a huge market for that in the first place.
I don’t think this will significantly impact inReach sales. The Globalstar network is not a serious competitor to Iridium for life-critical applications, and inReach-type devices have far wider operating ranges (try sending an SOS from your iPhone when the battery dies in any sort of sub-freezing weather) and much longer battery life.
How are they going to handle abuse? I know that there can be a cost to the user of a physical rescue (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/learning/should-people-wh...). But will Apple likewise charge users for their "rescue"?
Apple is not paying for the rescue. Neither is Garmin when you press the sos button on their phones.
Whatever is the cost of insurance for that type of service at Garmin and the dozens of competitors, I can assure you it did not come from the pocket of their CEO.
Even if you steal a phone and call for a rescue, whoever did the rescue will get paid regardless of your situation. The insurance company will sue your ass to the grounds, but that's a different discussion.
I had "rescue" in quotes - to mean not the actual rescue but Apple's part.
If millions of naughty teens ask to be "rescued", this is presumably costing Apple in satellite network fees.
They charge whatever nominal subscription for the message, rescue orgs have their own policies on charging fees after rescue
I'm not understanding the math. Globalstar satellites (I assume) are each individually able to transmit/receive dozens-to-hundreds of voice calls.
An iPhone is -- and only when out of cellular coverage -- transmitting position or message packet of a few Kb (?) very infrequently via the satellite. Multiply by even a few thousands of iPhones per satellite (if that), how does this equal 85% of satellite capacity?
It'd be interesting to know whether this is uplink-only, like most devices of the Spot series of devices on Globalstar, or whether the iPhone can also receive acknowledgements from the satellite.
As far as I understand, Globalstar's downlink capacity is (or at least was) severely limited and also uses a different frequency band than their uplink.
The announcement showed a conversation. "Do you have enough water?" "I have half a bottle." Then they talked about some new compression.
Thanks, I missed that part of the announcement.
That is a very important feature – knowing whether an SOS went through is extremely important in a life-or-death situation (for making the decision of whether to best stay put or try to climb to better signal etc).
PLBs are actually gaining that feature as well (by using Galileo as the forward path for the acknowledgement signal) for the same reason.
Does Galileo offer two-way communication?
Weren’t those part of the “pre-made” emergency questions they were showing?
Not 100% sure but I believe there was also other messages like "Help is on its way"
You are correct. I rewatched that part and seems like it can send small texts too.
Interesting they will do this but for smaller companies they will not go into contract if they are more than X% of ARR.
globalstar as a corporate entity is in such a weak and precarious financial position (due to its near obsolete satellite tech and existing network), with no money to fund the many hundreds of millions needed for a new build+launch campaign, that any partnership of this type is a life saver.
without this deal it would be inevitable for the company to get acquired and broken up for just the value of its operating and spectrum licenses.
Apple also appears to be taking an ownership stake in the company so that probably aligns the incentives and reduces the chance of them cutting and running.
On September 7, 2022, Apple Inc. (“Partner”) announced new satellite-enabled services for certain of its products.
Where's the announcement?
Here's the link to the announcement in the keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux6zXguiqxM&t=3568s
At the keynote this morning.
It they make it transmit nearby AirTags location it would make them much more attractive than competition (Tile).
Wondering how long it will take for it to work outside the Us
I've come to prefer Apple Maps. I like that it tells me "skip the next light" or "at the next light/stop sign, turn" rather than just the street name.
2012 was 10 years ago lol
old joke is old