I see a great lack of modern knowledge. Modern satellite internet constellations fly at 550km and there are no physical obstacles to making them faster than fibers.
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Report: Apple Has 'Secret Team' Working on Satellites to Beam Data Directly to iPhones
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Comment #52 and you're the first person to get it that this probably isn't about iPhones to come. Given the rollout timelines of a project like this it probably aligns with something bigger.
I still have my AT&T Terrestar Genius Sat/cell phone Windows mobile, and my Globalstar Sat/Verizon phones. All the Terrestar assests were bought by Dish Network After bankruptcy. I carry a Garmin Inreach Iridium communicator daily on some work project/locations. Not sure why the negative comments other than typical MacRumors ”intelligentsia” fortunately, those who don’t want it have the option.
You don't know that some people spent time away from cell towers! It's been a gripe of mine for a long time. iOS apps assume you're always connected. Try to find that document when you're in a third world company. Fortunately some map apps understand that, Navigon is one of the oldest which does that.
The real question is, who isn't looking into tapping into SpaceX Starlink?
en.m.wikipedia.org
Starlink - Wikipedia
I prefer they spend their money on this than spending Billions buying Beats, or other silly acquisitions...
Well, that would be great for government and business surveillance, but not a smart design choice. If you want to scale with the most robust functionality, you push intelligence out to the furtherest point practical, not centralize it. Just my experience. The 800-pound gorillas will do whatever they want; we just pay for it.
sure 5 billion humans @ 50$/month for satellite access is a potential 250 billion$/month industry 
not bad.
not bad.
This is one of the reasons Apple stock continues to grow, great idea but the question is if they could offer full internet, would they charge a fee for it or include it free with the purchase of an Apple device?
Sounds like this is not meant to replace local carriers but rather supplement them to allow transmission of certain types of data in specific situations. Sounds interesting but hard to see how anything like that could make sense financially for Apple.
Exactly. People are reading really wrong things into this. what I don't get is how Apple would recoup expenses if this is going to be a strictly supplementary system. I don't think they can charge customers for it whatever it turns out to be.
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Travel to any rural area of the US, or travel between US cities, and you’ll see why this is a looong way off (like decades). I’m sure eventually everything will be on distributed networks, but even then it’s likely future devices will still have offline storage and processing.
From the article linked in before.
"... For applications which benefit from low-latency communications, LEO satellite constellations provide an advantage over a geostationary satellite, where minimum theoretical latency from ground to satellite is about 125 milliseconds, compared to 1–4 milliseconds for a LEO satellite. A LEO satellite constellation can also provide more system capacity by frequency reuse across its coverage, with spot beam frequency use being analogous to the minimum number of satellites needed to provide a service, and their orbits—is a field in itself. .. "
[ GEO orbit is ~22K miles ( ~36 km). The two distances GEO versus LEO are significantly different. By the time the LEO bounces to some real backhaul it would be double digits . ]
What is going to be active in 4-5 years time isn't in the 100 ms range ( at least for relatively local there and back hops. ). Even wired can get 100ms if bounce very long distances with some old phone system wires mixed in.
And bandwidth will be the problem if put lots of folks/devices on these networks. There is zero wired "backhaul" from a satellite . If the end uses devices are densely physically clustered, more sats isn't going to make much of an impact. Number of ground stations has a big impact on pragmatic bandwidth too. (still would deep wired tie ins. ).
Okay, scotty, beam me up.
lolz. Joke aside, This is very helpful when cell data is not available.
lolz. Joke aside, This is very helpful when cell data is not available.
Mark Gurman could be making this stuff up from few pieces of information. I am willing to bet that it wont be Satellite communication bypassing Wireless Carrier.
And I am willing to bet it is highly likely something to do with Apple Maps and Geolocation.
Apple will no longer be relying on GPS, Galileo or BeiDou. They will have their own Satellite that gets Mapping Data, Geographics and Satellite navigation that is 0.01m accurate. Locations and Direction will now be dead accurate. It will also be an important pieces of puzzle for Apple Car / AV.
And I am willing to bet it is highly likely something to do with Apple Maps and Geolocation.
Apple will no longer be relying on GPS, Galileo or BeiDou. They will have their own Satellite that gets Mapping Data, Geographics and Satellite navigation that is 0.01m accurate. Locations and Direction will now be dead accurate. It will also be an important pieces of puzzle for Apple Car / AV.
This model wouldn't be sold in China as we already know that Apple values money over privacy.
From the text of the post you are responding to, "they" are anyone with reason to disrupt satellite communications. State actors, terrorists and criminals come to mind. My view is if things go that far then mobile phone reception will be the least of your problems, but these are scenarios taken seriously by governments and corporations that operate satellites.
