The iPhone14 introduces groundbreaking new emergency satellite communications, but this is likely just the beginning of Apple's plans for a connected world.
One of the most groundbreaking innovations in this year’s iPhone 14 lineup is something you’ll hopefully never have to use: the ability to summon help in remote areas by connecting to satellites instead of relying on traditional cellular networks.
Apple is likely following the same strategy with the new Emergency SOS via satellite feature, dipping its toes into the waters of satellite connectivity with a very useful feature that doesn’t put too much of a strain on the company’s resources or set unrealistically high customer expectations. An Apple spokesperson told Reuters that it has selected Globalstar as its partner to deploy the satellite infrastructure, with Apple covering 95% of the costs of building and launching the new satellites necessary to support satellite connectivity on the iPhone 14.
Nevertheless, Emergency SOS via satellite is an ideal way for Apple to roll out and test its satellite network without putting too much demand on it. Apple has also added satellite location reporting for the Find My network, which allows iPhone 14 owners to try the feature out even when they’re not in dire straits.
Communication satellites are hundreds of miles above the earth, moving thousands of miles per hour. While we don’t have any specs on the Apple/Globalstar satellites, the Iridium constellation comprises 66 satellites orbiting at 485 miles above Earth at 17,000 miles per hour. As things stand today, the iPhone 14 isn’t ready to handle a full-service text, data, and voice service via satellite. Bandwidth constraints mean that a single short text message can take 15 seconds to send even under ideal conditions, and in some cases, that can be as long as two or three minutes. That’s even factoring in the special compression algorithms that Apple designed to shrink text messages down to a third of their normal size.
For example, on average, U.S. smartphone users are only without a signal 1.09% of the time. However, those percentages increase significantly in certain areas like Alaska , Wyoming , Vermont , Montana , West Virginia , Idaho , Colorado , and Oregon . The other approach is to use more traditional satellite frequencies, and this is what Apple has done with the iPhone 14 and the satellite constellation it’s deployed in partnership with Globalstar. Reports last year suggested that Apple was planning to adopt 5G satellite connectivity using band 53, but that’s a terrestrial frequency used by Globalstar for private 5G networks; it has nothing to do with satellite communications.
For one thing, sending and receiving texts can be glacially slow compared to traditional cellular networks. It may take two to three minutes to exchange a couple of messages. Plus, you’ll have to lock onto a satellite first.
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