The ordinary text message is today the most ordinary thing, having nothing to do with the latest advances in communication technology. However, the rather young Lynk company has radically changed the above statement, it became the first company that managed to send text messages from a satellite in Earth orbit, directly to an ordinary cell phone located on the surface of the Earth. And it turns out that the implementation of such simple, at first glance, technologies is quite a big problem.
Modern telecommunications, in one way or another, rely on artificial satellites. It is through satellites that information is transmitted over great distances, before this information is returned back to Earth. However, there has never been a case in history where a satellite has been able to communicate directly with a cell phone. Such a capability is realized in a new Lynk technology called cell-tower-in-space, which avoids the need to deploy cell tower networks on Earth, which are expensive in themselves and require periodic maintenance.
This, in turn, will make it possible to provide mobile coverage in hard-to-reach and sparsely populated regions, where the traditional approach is not financially practical. Satellite telephones used to be used for the same purposes, but satellite telephone service was and is a very expensive pleasure, both in terms of the cost of equipment and in terms of the cost of subscriber service.
Radio receiving and transmitting equipment of Lynk company provides the data transfer on the frequencies and standards of cellular networks at the distance up to 480 kilometers (300 miles), which is enough to organize communication between satellites in orbit and cell phones on the surface of the Earth. In this case, when a cell phone is in the usual coverage area, it works with ground-based cellular towers, but as soon as a subscriber gets into a “white spot”, his phone unobtrusively switches to work with the “constellation” of Lynk satellites. The company now has four satellites in orbit, launched six months apart. This, of course, is not enough to cover all the “white spots” of cellular coverage on Earth, but it is enough for a practical demonstration of the possibilities of this technology.
Lynk, formerly Ubiquitilink, currently has more than thirty potential customers interested in the new technology. However, the company still has a long way to go from the first demonstration of capabilities to the full practical implementation of their project, which involves the deployment of an entire network of satellites. But given that SpaceX has already demonstrated a way to reduce the cost of deploying a network of satellites in low orbit through the Starlink project, Lynk’s plans may not be so far off.
