With a SpaceX rocket launch late Monday, a Spanish company called Sateliot expects to take its first step toward giving you text messaging capabilities in remote parts of the world where traditional mobile networks are failing.
The Barcelona-based startup with 50 employees is one of a growing number of attempts to use satellites 310 miles above our heads in low-Earth orbit to bring us closer to the promise of ubiquitous connectivity. With Apple, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Qualcomm all headed in the same direction, it seems likely that in the near future, stranded motorists and infected hitchhikers won’t be isolated.
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A satellite launch, from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, is expected to carry the first of five satellites into orbit this year, enough to get the satellite’s first phase up and running. Next year, the company plans to have 64 satellites in orbit, and then 256 in 2025. That will be enough, he said, to enable text messaging conversations.
“We are a cell tower in space for mobile operators,” Jaume Sanpera, CEO of SatelioT, said in an exclusive interview. “These are small satellites — nanosatellites — that allow us to cover everywhere in nearly real time in three years.”
Sateliot is not alone in its ambition to use data links that leap across the sky. Here are some other players:
With Sateliot technology, you will never know that you are using their service. Your phone will simply connect to its own satellite through carrier partnerships.
Although the company’s long-term plan is to help consumers, that’s not where it started. Instead, it plans, with its constellation of five satellites this year, to connect companies in areas such as logistics and shipping, Sanpira said. It signed three deals totaling about $1.1 billion to enable such services.
Each satellite can communicate with a patch of land about three times the size of Texas as it flies over it. With the small initial constellation, Sateliot can guarantee satellite contact once a day. Since the device on the planet knows when the satellites will be in the sky, it can wake up to communicate and spend the rest of its hours sleeping in a low-power state. This means the batteries will last for years.
Some communications satellites are enormous, like the bus-sized Hughes communications satellite set to launch in the coming weeks, but Sateliot’s first models are much smaller: about 4 by 8 by 12 inches, or about the size of a large cereal box with a size called 6U or 6U cubesat. Next year’s satellites will be twice as thick, with a 12U design.
But thanks to the miniaturization of electronics, these tiny systems can be powerful. Which is why something of a new space race is afoot, this time between tech companies rather than political superpowers.
“People want to have messages everywhere,” Sanpera said.