By 
Starlink plans to begin testing its satellite-to-cellular service in 2023, SpaceX vice president of Starlink enterprise sales, Jonathan Hofeller has revealed.
The comment was made at the Satellite Conference and Exhibition 2023 and first reported by CNBC journalist Michael Sheetz.
As it stands, Starlink is only capable of providing broadband Internet to customers who are connected to one of its proprietary dish antennas.
Hofeller didn’t specifically say which Telco SpaceX was working with, but the timeline certainly lines up with Musk’s original vision for the T-Mobile partnership in August, where he promised that Starlink V2 would launch in 2023 and would “transmit direct to mobile phones, eliminating dead zones worldwide.”
While the first phones with purpose-made satellite modems are only expected in the coming years, T-Mobile will bypass this requirement by allowing Starlink to operate on some of its licenced spectrum.
Hofeller said the company wanted to take Starlink’s satellite-to-cellular capabilities beyond complementing terrestrial tower coverage and believed its low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation was best equipped to achieve that.
He believes that SpaceX still had a lot to learn about the potential of this capability.
Starlink aims is to provide connectivity to customers in rural locations or hard-to-reach areas where expanding a tower network is difficult or economically unfeasible.
Comments