Startup Lynk Global <\/b>recently hit a Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) milestone by sending a message from a satellite directly to a cell phone on Earth \u2014 and one of the company\u2019s co-founders says the implications of this technology will surpass 5G. <\/p>\n
Lynk\u2019s goal is to provide text messaging via LEO nanosatellites that connect directly to unmodified mobile phones. Lynk co-founder and CEO Charles Miller said the company will bring connectivity to the 90% of the earth\u2019s surface that is outside the bounds of terrestrial wireless, and predicts it will be a bigger achievement than the \u201cincremental\u201d advance of 5G. <\/p>\n
\u201cGoing from zero to anything \u2014 it is transformational for the rest of the planet. People will pay for that,\u201d said Miller, who also co-founded Nanoracks <\/strong>and is a former NASA<\/b> senior advisor for commercial space. \u201cWhat we\u2019re doing is a bigger deal than 5G.\u201d <\/p>\n Miller cast his team\u2019s LEO achievement as something separate from other LEO ventures like SpaceX<\/b>\u2019s Starlink. He said Lynk is inventing a new category which he calls \u201csatellite front haul,\u201d because it is transmitted direct to phone, instead of WiFi to a fixed antenna at a specific site. Instead of growing the satellite industry, Miller said this company expands the mobile wireless industry, which he said could be a $300 billion to $400 billion opportunity over the long-term. <\/p>\n \u201c[When] you walk out of the Wi-Fi set coverage, you\u2019re gonna roam onto our network and we\u2019ll provide coverage,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to be as fast as any of the other guys. But we fill in all the black spots. So we\u2019re a completely different category of service.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not about space \u2014 just space happens to be the way we do it,\u201d Miller added. <\/p>\n The Falls Church, Virginia-based company recently announced that on Feb. 24, it successfully connected a satellite in LEO to a mobile phone on Earth, and has sent a text message from space to a mobile phone, calling it the first development of its kind.<\/p>\n Lynk, formerly UbiquitiLink, calls its satellites \u201ccell towers in space.\u201d The company has four satellites in-orbit after its most recent launch on SpaceX\u2019s CRS-20 mission on March 6. The company plans to expand testing with this spacecraft, called Lynk The World, this coming summer. <\/p>\n Lynk\u2019s solution is to lower the altitude of their satellites, narrow the slant range with a higher gain antenna, and operate in the sub-1 GHz spectrum allocated for mobile phone wireless users.<\/p>\n The hard part, Miller said, was figuring out how to make the connection without additional hardware on the phone. The solution, which co-founder and Vice President of Technology & Strategy Tyghe Speidel patented in March 2017, takes the standard software stack in the cell tower and puts it in the satellite, which solves most of the software needs. Then, the satellite compensates for the doppler shift that would break the link with the phone by \u201ctricking\u201d the phone into thinking the satellite is closer than it is. <\/p>\n At first, Miller said, even Speidel thought the technology was impossible to achieve, but they realized that \u201cmost engineers hadn\u2019t done the bottoms-up fundamental physics of the link budget between a phone and a satellite.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cOur technology basically takes the satellite and turns it into a standard ordinary cell tower from the perspective of everybody\u2019s phone in their pocket, the mobile phone they love and take with them everywhere,\u201d Miller said. \u201cOur satellite in orbit looks like a cell tower to them, smells like a cell tower and sounds like a cell tower, and they and they operate with it like a cell tower. <\/p>\n Lynk\u2019s near-term goal is to have 30 to 40 satellites up in order to provide what Miller calls \u201cperiodic commercial service.\u201d At that point, a rancher working outside in remote Montana with no connectivity, for example, could send and receive text messages about once an hour, when a satellite passes overhead. <\/p>\n The technology was developed in response to the Ebola crisis in Africa, when the third co-founder Margo Deckard realized that aid workers were using donated satellite terminals primarily for text messaging. Deckard, who is now COO, saw the value that could be provided if phones were able to connect directly to satellites.<\/p>\n Lynk announced its milestone in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic and, although Miller said the company will not be operational to have an impact on the current crisis, he sees the technology having enormous impact on emergency response <\/p>\n \u201cWe are ubiquitous backup, resilient, networking for emergency responders,\u201d Miller said. \u201cIf you\u2019re dealing with COVID, or Ebola in remote areas, we will enable you to stay connected to emergency responders. Down the road once we\u2019re in service, we will be part of a fully integrated emergency response service.\u201d <\/p>\n Miller said Lynk wants to offer an emergency messaging service, but does not want to profit off of it. Instead, Lynk\u2019s strategy as it gains regulatory approval and landing rights in countries around the world, is to partner with Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) as roaming partners, and offer the emergency message service for free in the countries in which it operates. <\/p>\n The company reports it is in collaboration with around 30 MNOs. It is testing under Cellular One\u2019s spectrum license, according to its Special Temporary Authority (STA) application, filed with the FCC<\/strong> in 2018. In addition, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2019 that Vodafone<\/strong> Hutchison Australia<\/strong> is a test partner. <\/p>\n \u201cSatellite companies and mobile operators are in a position where they\u2019re constantly fighting, but we\u2019re going to be the best friend of the mobile network operators,\u201d Miller said. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna be a global wholesaler of connectivity services that they get to sell to their subscribers, and they are going to treat us just like a roaming partner.\u201d <\/p>\n The company counts Steve Case, former CEO of AOL<\/strong> among its investors. Case connected with Lynk through its investor firm Unshackled Ventures<\/b>, and he invested in Lynk via Revolution<\/b>\u2019s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund. Lynk lists Blazar Ventures, RRE Ventures, Avonlea Capital and One Way Ventures among its other investors. <\/p>\n \u201cHis background as the former CEO of AOL .. was connecting the world. So we\u2019re kind of carrying on Steve\u2019s mission to connect the world,\u201d Miller said. <\/p>\n Lynk plans to build and launch hardware about every six months as funding allows. Miller said at this point, how fast the company can enter commercial service comes down to how much money the company can raise, and how fast it can build satellites. <\/p>\n Miller said that with regulatory approval, Lynk plans for the satellites it launches this coming fall to provide initial commercial service, and global emergency response services as well. <\/p>\n \u201cWe think, because of the indisputable existence proof of what we\u2019ve done providing a global emergency response service, that regulators are going to want this sooner rather than later because we can save lives,\u201d Miller said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Startup Lynk Global recently hit a Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) milestone by sending a message from a satellite directly to a cell phone on Earth \u2014 and one of the company\u2019s co-founders says the implications of this technology will surpass 5G. Lynk\u2019s goal is to provide text messaging via LEO nanosatellites that connect directly to unmodified mobile […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60068,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60065"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Technology That \u2018Tricks\u2019 the Cellphone<\/h3>\n
Lynk\u2019s MNO Market Strategy<\/h3>\n