The Real Evernet: Satellite Networks
What if you didn't need to get your telephone service from a cellular network? And it worked everywhere and was as fast as a wired connection. Fantasy?
Forget Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Vodafone, or any of the other cellular carriers anywhere in the world. Throw in cable internet services like Comcast Xfinity, Dish, Cox and all the others. There is a whole new world of communications technology just beginning to emerge.
This new form of communications is going to take place on your smartphone. In several generations of smart phones, possibly in 2030 or a little later, one chip in the phone will enable high-speed, persistent internet access through satellite networks, potentially bypassing cellular and wired networks completely. The two companies making this evolution happen are SpaceX through its Starlink satellite network and Apple through its iPhone ecosystem.
Starlink: SpaceX has been rapidly building its satellite network to the point that there are now 6,300 Starlink satellites orbiting in low-earth orbit (two thirds of the total number of satellites!). As part of that, Starlink provides proprietary terminals to access the network. It started with a terminal that weighed more than six pounds and was designed to be permanently installed on a building. But it just introduced Starlink Mini, which weighs 2.5 pounds and can fit into a backpack. (Technically true, but it comes with a 49-foot cable to plug it in, meaning you can’t hike more than 49 feet away from a power plug unless you bring your power plug with you — in a Tesla Cybertruck).
Starlink Mini is like 40% of the size and weight of the original terminal, introduced in 2019: that might suggest in another five years maybe Starlink (or others) could turn it into a chip that is embedded in silicon and integrated into another device, like a smart phone.
One clue to what Elon Musk is thinking is SpaceX’s application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to provide its “direct to cell” service, free for emergency calls but paid for regular service. Guess who is objecting to this FCC permit: Verizon and AT&T among others! Do Verizon and AT&T see the writing on the wall that will lead to making their huge capital investment in cell towers and bandwidth being obsolete? (T-Mobile is not objecting since it is partnering with SpaceX, which is also partnering with other providers in different regions outside the U.S. Just to note, direct to cell service actually uses the cellular network to provide data connections to the satellites, which is not the same as the phone talking directly to the satellite.)
The wireless cellular industry is, typically, trying to protect its control of wireless spectum by creating a new 6G standard to replace the 5G that’s mostly deployed now and the older but more widely adopted LTE. 6G is still in development and has been for seven years; it’s not hard to imagine that, by the time the industry agrees on a new cellular standard, every smart phone will already have integrated satellite communications and won’t need the carriers any more. Is that a bold statement?
Apple: The iPhone maker has been working at the same problem from the other end, which started with the iPhone 14 with the introduction of SOS emergency service two years ago. SOS lets the user can make an emergency call via satellite if no other signal is available, a capability that previously required a specialized device like the Garmin inReach, a “satellite communicator”. Apple’s Emergency SOS was cool and applauded widely, and has helped save a few people in distress.
But a new feature in IOS 18 was announced at Apple’s developer conference this. year: it doesn’t need to be an emergency anymore: you will be able to send a text message without any other signal through the satellite network that Apple has been developing with Globalstar (whose satellites are ironically being carried to orbit by SpaceX). I don’t know whether you will be able to send a photo, but imagine standing at the top of Mount Everest and sharing the view with your partner or friends back home via iMessage. Watch iJustine give the low-down on this feature.
The iPhone’s ability to communicate with satellites is done entirely in software, so far. That means the processing is being done primarily by its CPU, which is inherently inefficient. The company is already a leader in the adoption of e-sims, allowing users to easily move between cellular networks. It has also been working for years on making its own modem hardware, instead of buying it from Qualcomm. You can imagine Apple might want to create a single piece of silicon that can merge wireless, cellular and satellite communications without depending on its CPU or third party chips.
The other smartphone companies understand that this is something they need to work on too. Ironically, Android introduced an SOS feature (perhaps inspired by Garmin) before Apple; Samsung used Android to introduce SOS in its phones in 2016. But the implementation was so bumbled that users had to disable it from making unwanted emergency calls. Now Samsung has integrated SOS into its phones the same way Apple did. And Google announced Google SOS for the Pixel 9 last month. Both vendors are two years behind Apple, which is now adding the next-gen capability of sending iMessages via satellite. As usual, it will be hard for the other smartphone vendors to catch up if they have to wait to see how Apple did it.
But the race is on. What’s interesting is to speculate what will be in the iPhone 20 Pixel 12, or Galaxy S30. Maybe it isn’t that bold to speculate that these future generations of phones will not need terrestrial, line-of-sight cellular services any more? Maybe even smart watches won’t need the host phone to communicate either? Everything gets smaller, faster, like always.
My headline refers to “The Evernet”. This was a forecast our firm made in 2010 that was intended to show our investors what we thought would happen in the next 10 years. We had the idea that the increasing speed and performance of the internet would change how all transactions would happen, big and small. It was novel enough that the Wall Street Journal wrote a little piece about it. We were right (this is what enabled social applications and crypto exchanges, for better or worse), but we were also wrong.
We were too focused on the evolution of cellular networks. So we told the Wall Street Journal that the key was IPv6, the next evolution of the Internet Protocol. It was important: Google reports that half the traffic on the internet originates from an IPv6 address, which has improved the performance and stability of the internet. But it’s only half in the last 14 years, which is pretty slow compared to the five-year history of Starlink. And it shows the danger of forecasting a linear result: We didn’t imagine that phones could talk to satellites in real time and that there would be enough satellites in orbit to make it work from any spot on the globe.
This evolution of real-time, synchronous satellite communications is what people call a non-linear development, something that Elon Musk seems to have specialized in. But in this case, now that the evolution can even be seen by people like me as well as more technically proficient people, it’s only going to speed up and bring us to another level of connectedness even faster.