AST SpaceMobile has completed a 5G call between Hawaii and Spain using a smartphone and the company’s satellite, and claimed a first in the race to serve places where wireless networks don’t reach.
The phone used in the call had “no app, no special Sim cards, nothing special. It’s the phone exactly like you have in your pocket,” SpaceMobile chairman Abel Avellan said in an interview.
Companies are vying to offer service when the world’s estimated five billion mobile phones stray outside cellular coverage areas.
The new services aim to offer connections using normal consumer mobile phones, rather than specialised equipment. Companies moving towards that goal include T-Mobile US, which has a partnership with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as well as Lynk Global, which says it is sending and receiving text messages to and from space via standard unmodified mobile devices.
AST SpaceMobile said it placed a call on 8 September from a wireless dead zone near Hana, Hawaii, to a Vodafone Group engineer in Madrid, AST SpaceMobile said in a news release. The call used AT&T frequencies and SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker 3 test satellite. Separately, the equipment achieved a download rate of about 14Mbit/s, according to the company based in Midland, Texas.
“With this, we have demonstrated the ability to put 5G in every corner of the planet,” Avellan said. The fifth generation of mobile telephony describes a suite of technologies that is coming into wide use following the 4G service that connects many phones today. Avellan said AST SpaceMobile is limited by a small set of test frequencies and can achieve greater speeds with a broader swathe of airwaves.
SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker 3 test satellite is the forerunner of a planned globe-circling fleet.
Chris Sambar, head of network at AT&T, likened the technology to putting a cell tower in space.
“I’m pretty confident that at some point here in the not-too-distant future we’re going to have 5G wherever we want it, as long as you can see a satellite,” Sambar said in an interview. — Todd Shields, (c) 2023 Bloomberg LP
