Eliminating Cell Phone Towers
Space Startup Spotlight: LYNK
Cell phone towers are a blight on the landscape, but until recently, they were the only way to connect mobile phone users reliably. Now, though, a budding space startup says it has sent the first cell phone text message via a network of satellites without the need for any ground-based infrastructure.
The newspace company behind the breakthrough, Lynk, wants to develop satellite phone solutions that people can use anywhere in the world. Currently, there are about 5.5 billion mobile phone users worldwide, but 750 million can’t use their devices at any given time because they stray outside of cellphone tower range. That’s despite paying a collective total of more than $1 trillion per year to mobile network operators
Lynk’s satphone system would fundamentally change this dynamic. With a fully fleshed-out system, smartphone users would have access to signal anywhere on the planet, even in rural communities in the developing world.
Satellites, the company says, will fundamentally change our expectations of network operators. The new paradigm will provide coverage of equal quality to all corners of the globe, irrespective of their geographic remoteness. People living in sparsely-inhabited regions such as Africa, Australia, and central Asia will receive identical service quality as those in the cities.
Lynk is the brainchild of Charles Miller, an entrepreneur with over thirty years in the space industry. Miller has been the driving force behind several public-private partnerships in the space industry over recent years and has been behind the delivery of more than seven hundred payloads into space.
While the company is only at the proof-of-concept stage, Miller sees no reason why he and the team can’t deliver a minimally viable service to business customers by the end of 2020. As he sees it, it is just a matter of getting the regulators to sign off on the project, and gaining the support and trust of mobile partners.
Interestingly, Miller’s project doesn’t seek to make existing mobile network operators obsolete (as some other mega-constellations do). Instead, he plans to rent out network capacity to existing network providers so that they can offer customers with service, even if they move out of cell tower range.
Lynk is also innovating on the technical front. Its satellites are tiny, weighing less than 55 pounds, allowing it to pack dozens of them into each payload. Miller says that Lynk will begin offering commercial partner services with just a handful of satellites in orbit. With higher numbers, fully-fledged 4G-style connectivity will become feasible.
It is difficult to understate the magnitude of what Lynk is trying to do here. This endeavor isn’t a glorified school project. It is something that could fundamentally change the way we communicate. The startup sees its job as essentially turning all current cell phones into satphones, removing the need for towers, and ending the scourge of signal loss for good. For many, what Miller is doing is more critical than 5G because it will connect the world’s most impoverished populations to the global conversation. He’s bringing internet access to more than a billion people who have none. And that, in his words, is “that’s life-altering.”
You can learn more about Lynk from their website, and their social media accounts: LinkedIn & Twitter. You can also find them on NewSpace Hub, here.
“Space Startup Spotlight” is a new, regularly-scheduled, profile of an up-and-coming space startup from around the world by NewSpace Hub.
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