So much of the comments so far have focussed on two things: 1. This might be wrong or misunderstood but I'm pretty sure it's not deliberate lies. Let's reserve words like "fake" for knowingly misleading or malicious misinformation. Like I said, I have an InReach, I'm commonly in areas with no cell service and so for me this would be a clear win and I would love it, but, I suspect I'm squarely in the minority. If Iridium doesn't want to work with Apple the company could surely be acquired for effectively pocket change by Apple and if they did release such hardware and charge a monthly subscription for "100% global coverage" it could be pretty quickly profitable.īut, with all of that said, I'm really not sure why Apple would want to do this. I have a Garmin InReach which operates on Iridium, it's a 5+ year-old-device which works fine with Iridium in very challenging conditions and isn't very much larger than an iPhone.Ĭonsidering (some of) the commercial side of this, I strongly suspect the Iridium network has more than enough capacity for such a plan and Iridium could easily support it technically and they could work out some reasonable commercial terms with Apple for this. Iridium would work fine for this if you limit it to iMessage/SMS and anything else low-bandwidth (I would imagine they add 911/SOS support too). I agree it's unlikely, but, not for technical reasons. Apple was able to keep the iPhone under wraps, but it's impossible to do that with satellite launches and FCC filings as we've learned with SpaceX.
I don't claim to be an expert in any of this, adding this capability an iPhone would be as disruptive as the iPhone itself was. Any incumbent satellite operators (such as Thuraya, mentioned in another comment) are in Geostationary orbit, not LEO. Unless Apple has been secretly launching their own fleet of satellites, where are they getting the bandwidth? I doubt it's Starlink.
The same antenna issue applies.Ģ) Bandwidth.
They're not going to magically stuff that into an iPhone.ĮDIT: Some replies have said "Hey, Iridium is LEO". Starlink is in a lower than usual orbit, and look at the immense effort/expense to make base station antennae that can reliably communicate with the satellites. I'm going to call it exactly as I see it: This is fake.ġ) LEO.
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