US company connects mobile phones directly to satellites

Virginia-based company, Lynk, has successfully demonstrated the ability to use ordinary, unmodified mobile telephones to connect to satellite Internet services, Report informs referring to ArsTechnica.

The company sent its "Shannon" satellite into orbit three months ago as part of a rideshare mission on a Falcon 9 rocket. After some initial tests, the company said "hundreds" of mobile phones in the US, UK, and the Bahamas were able to connect with the satellite as it passed overhead, as if it were a virtual cell phone tower in space.

"Basically, our satellite looks to your cell phone like a standard cell tower," said Charles Miller, the co-founder and chief executive of Lynk. The service is intended to serve remote areas where a customer's mobile provider, such as T-Mobile or Verizon in the US, doesn’t have coverage.

To make it all work, Lynk had to solve a number of technical problems, Miller said. Chief among these was being able to send uplink signals from a mobile phone to a satellite through the "noise" of other phones. Another challenge was compensating for the huge amount of doppler shift between the satellite and mobile phone on the ground.

Existing phones and mobile networks are set up to accommodate bullet train speeds but not orbital velocities. Lynk engineers had to devise the technology for the satellite to perform this doppler compensation in space so that the phone "sees" what appears to be a fixed tower.

Lynk is starting small. With a single satellite, coverage is only available for a few minutes daily, across several degrees of latitude. With 10 satellites next year at an altitude of about 500 km, Miller said, the goal is to have coverage for much of the planet every several hours. By 2023, with about 100 satellites, there would be coverage every 5 to 20 minutes. To build a continuous, real-time network will require 1,500 satellites, he said.