Cord Cutters By Shelby Brown on September 19, 2023
AT&T phone home? Well, sort of. AST SpaceMobile, the cellular satellite company backed by the mobile carrier, placed a satellite call over 5G. It’s the “first ever” 5G connection between an unmodified smartphone and a space satellite.
On September 8, AST SpaceMobile used a Samsung Galaxy S22 smartphone in a wireless dead zone in Maui, Hawaii, to call a Vodafone engineer in Madrid, Spain. Between AT&T’s 5G spectrum, Nokia’s network core and AST SpaceMobile’s low Earth orbit satellite, BlueWalker 3, the cell signal reached its destination.
This is a huge step forward for global connectivity. Being able to connect a low Earth orbit satellite to regular, everyday smartphones could potentially eliminate the notion of dead zones. This means reliable, quality connectivity in remote areas, perhaps for the first time, which would be a boon for emergency services.
The 5G home internet competition is fierce and interest in satellite connectivity is growing. T-Mobile and Space X’s Starlink announced a 5G partnership in August. Starlink has over 5,000 internet satellites in orbit with more planned to launch in the near future. Amazon plans to launch a low-Earth orbit satellite constellation, currently codenamed Project Kuiper, and Vodafone wants to use Project Kuiper’s high-bandwidth, low-latency network to improve connectivity services in Africa and Europe, two areas where the company has high concentrations of customers.
More:
https://cordcuttersnews.com/att-successfully-made-a-5g-phone-call-from-space/
