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AT&T Introduces Satellite-Enabled Smart Phone
crimeandpunishment writes "Here's one way to deal with spotty cell phone coverage: backstop the network on a satellite. AT&T is now selling its first satellite-enabled smart phone....which could be invaluable for boaters, forest rangers, and others who regularly leave regular cellular coverage areas. But the TerreStar Genus comes with a hefty price tag: $799.....and the data costs are as sky-high as the satellite....400 times more than a standard plan. It also has to have a clear view of the southern sky, which means it can only be used outdoors."
Does it come pre-encrusted in diamonds or not? :p
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
As long as someone else pays the bill...like the government (ie forest ranger)
Why hasn't someone created a device like this that uses the widely available direcway/blue sky technology? Given the maximum per channel bandwidth and the relatively small needs of a voice communication device it seems like a fairly low power device should be able to function with acceptable psnr.
Voice via satellite is still too expensive; instead they should offer satellite texting at a reasonable price. At least then you're still connected.
See? I was right all along. I'm gonna make millions on this, I tell you, millions! This will totally make up for my Iridium investment....I can feel it.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
I guess you missed the banner at the top of the page that indicates this is a geek site. We like technology 'round these parts, luddite.
Caveat Utilitor
Doesn't matter if it's satellite enabled or not, you're probably not going to have the patience to make a call!
In the late the late 80s, Motorola had a scheme to launch 77 LEO satellites to provide global satellite coverage. I thought it was a great idea at the time, and bought a bunch of Motorola stock. It didn't work out very well. They eventually launched 66 satellites, but didn't change the name of the project to whatever has atomic number 66.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
799 is a hefty price for a gadget?? remind me how much nexus was going for on google site? and with regards to data costing 400 time more - excuse moi, i don't know where are you from, but here in canada rogers beats any satellite plan hands down.
Iridium uses its own network of satellites. Iridium is expensive. A direcway subscription is like 60 bucks a month with about 600MB a day allotment. Seems they could partner with a phone provider to offer a 10MB a day channel for a pretty low fee, what's needed is a means of accessing the technology.
crappy (US only) satellite coverage
TFS says you need a clear view of the southern sky. Doesn't sound like US only to me.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I never said it was, AC. Never said it was a good deal, either.
Actually according to the link you provided it's $15/month access fee, plus $0.99 per minute, plus $595 for the phone itself (it's "on sale", regularly $699). I'm sure there are plenty of other charges you only find out about once you sign up too, just like every other telecommunications deal.
Caveat Utilitor
It's not the first time a phone company has tried to sell combined satellite-terrestrial phones. Sprint Nextel Corp. sold Iridium phones in 1999, and Airtouch, a predecessor of Verizon Wireless, sold Globalstar phones a year a later.
So this has been done before
"Neither of them had any meaningful success because there just wasn't mass market demand for the phones," said Tim Farrar, a satellite industry consultant.
It crashed and burned
Hill said the Genus is a different breed, because it can be used a main phone, with most of the conveniences expected from smart phones, without the bulk of a traditional satellite phone. The cost to include the satellite option is also coming down, which means the feature could show up in more, and cheaper, phones in the near future, he said.
But this is different, because you can use it like a normal phone, only it's -really- expensive. However, a cheaper option may be available in the future. Someone needs to be fired. No one wanted to pay $5/meg before, and no one wants to pay $5/meg now. I don't care if it has a built in keyboard and calendar. Come back when you have the the cheaper future version.
They should be selling a PicoCell that relays to the satellite with priority going to land based cell towers. Then don't charge for access. This way, it would be a lot harder to NOT rationalize putting one in your car. What is $600 added to the price of your car to know that you will always have coverage. With the current plan, there is no way I would ever user their service. I simply could not rationalize the price. If I already had the service, and only had to worry about minute charges, I just might use it if I was out in the middle of nowhere.
Well okay but the reference to the southern sky probably means it uses equatorial satellites, which should at least work to the same south latitude as the northern limit.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Southern sky from what part of the planet?
Frikking Northernhepisphereocentrics.
If you're going charge 800 fucking dollars for a phone your could atleast load it up with a better OS than Windows Mobile 6.5 (can I say EW!).
You can already be tracked, with good accuracy, when carrying ANY cell phone that is "on". And the big issue is that those records can be (and might be) stored.
At 40 cents a minute, it is way cheaper than all other Sat phones, and would be great for marine use.
Too bad they will only target the US, that leaves any cruising boats out of the picture once they venture away from the shores of the US (_sigh_).
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerreStar-1: ...carries E/F band (IEEE S band) transponders which will be used to provide mobile communications to North America...raise itself into geostationary orbit
So technically not just the US but still limited to North America.
1) ATT ... NO ... NO ... NO ... NO
2) Windows Mobile
3) $595
4) $1 / min
5)???
6) Fail
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This isn't groundbreaking tech.
Actually, it is. Its the largest commercial satellite ever launched. The comm technology isn't too shabby either. Iridium had 66 satellites and this gets it done with one. Sure its just North America but thats at least 1/4 of the satellite phone market. To handle that takes significantly advanced signal processing. Also, Inmarsat has data but only in a modem the size of a laptop. Granted it is a lot cheaper for voice.
AT&T are full of it! Instead of improving their network, they are busy doing this stuff. Where's the leadership?
But...if it has the power to go like 60 miles up through the ionosphere (I assume but don't actually remember how far up that is) and hit a satellite, it'll probably melt your freaking face off with radiation. Or more realistically at least give you like 100x the dose of radiation compared to a normal cell phone. Sounds kinda scary.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I was told that what killed Iridium was the local Telecom laws.
Originally Iridium was going to bounce international calls directly satellite to satellite, but the local Telecoms screamed blue-murder so Iridium was forced to put ground-stations in each country and use conventional international links. So the cost of calls went way up.
It gets worse, it also means using multiple synchronous satellite links, so it has long time delays.
I don't really know, but it does sounds convincing.
Anyone complaining about the cost is missing the point of this phone. Satellite mode is not for idle chatter. It's for essential weather/safety/navigation/professional needs. And perhaps brief family communication such as when to expect you home. I would expect boaters to lease this just for the trip rather than purchase their own $800 device. All in all AT&T should be able to sell the service even for 5x rate with the right marketing.
In England they are stored. I know this because they were used to prove that a murder suspect wasn't at the scene of the murder, which meant he was found not guilty.
Also, the additional $204 on the phone gives you a GSM smart phone running Windows Mobile. With the other option, you would have to buy a separate GSM or CDMA phone for regular city use, and that may well cost more than $204.
The groundbreaking tech is that you can get a sat phone you can fit in your pocket. Previous geostationary phones would fit in a laptop bag, and Iridium phones would fit in a laptop bag alongside a laptop.
Just the one as far as I can gather, and the dish is pointing in the general direction of the US.
$5 per megabyte is actually a bargain compared to, say, the AT&T international roaming data rate of $19.97 per megabyte, as illustrated here.
>No, that means his phone wasn't there. It doesn't prove that he wasn't there.
Exactly. Such technology can be used to frame people, to falsely "prove innocent", for bad people to find and take advantage of good people, and generally to invade everyone's privacy. It is not a panacea of peace, harmony, and security as some would believe.
Offtopic: Am I the only one getting a Bussiness Software Alliance anti piracy ad on top?
I think the main advantage of SMS is, ironically, that it is not free. Thanks to this, SMS has been so far pretty much inmune to spam. I don't know the techincal difficulties, but setting up bogus cell phone numbers and injecting spam SMS has been so far not a common practice. I live in Europe and I love that calling on my cell phone is charged to the *caller* --as opposed to NA, where you pay your own air time--. This means that I only get calls from people that really wanna talk to me. Same with SMS, I only get texts from people that really want to text me. I like it this way, even if it costs me more.
It's not the same thing - on the one hand you're receiving data from the internet, in the other case you are sending data which you are asking the network to notify a gsm phone to receive this data, and to keep trying until the mobile is able to receive it.
I have tested one of these things out. If you go out of coverage area pretty regularly but only need your phone in an extreme emergency this phone might be useful as a replacement for an iridium. The problem is you have to use a hands free headset to make the satellite service work. You also have to peak in the phone to get a good link to the satellite then maintain the pointing of the phone throughout the conversation else you drop the call. This is actually pretty difficult to do. The delay on the phone is also about 1 second witch makes conversations very difficult.
sorry for my comments, I'm drunk
In economics professor land what you say is true.
In the real world, people get upset and offended when they discover that the price differential between what they paid for something and what it cost to make is too large. It's not economically rational, it's just human nature.
This strikes me as excellent news. Why has it taken so long? Terrestrial wireless where possible, satellite otherwise. But by insisting on real time interactive communication we're still operating in the past. Geostar would have had interactive short text messaging, like current cell phones, with similar bandwidth requirements (miniscule), at high power (how does 500 watts strike you?), with low power supply requirements (500 watts for a few milliseconds every few minutes at most means average power usage is very small). By now, Geostar service would be relatively cheap. (It also would have had GPS-like capability without separate GPS satellites.) How often do we really need interactive voice when we're in the wilderness? What's more, with the recent work on voice audio compression, packets of voice could be sent cheaply, too. Interactivity on the order of a few seconds should meet most people's requirements, if not preferences. I prefer real time voice with no lag, but not if it costs 10 or 100 times as much. So come on, AT&T and others, offer satellite backup service for SMS only at a decent price!
Well okay but the reference to the southern sky probably means it uses equatorial satellites, which should at least work to the same south latitude as the northern limit.
Not likely. The satellite this uses has one big dish which is pointed in the general direction of the US. Southern hemisphere users could get a signal to the satellite just the same, but it's not listening in their direction.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
You can argue about the evidence. The court did look at the evidence and concluded he was with his phone at the time. That's not the point, the point is that the evidence was available for the court to look at, thereby proving that tracking does take place.