SpaceX handles D2C texts from New Zealand
- by Advanced Television
- Oct 22, 2024
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By Chris Forrester
Ben Longmier, Senior Director, satellite engineering at SpaceX (and a co-founder of Swarm Technologies), confirmed on October 21st that SpaceX’s New Zealand cellular partner, One NZ. had sent their first text message via the Starlink system.
“[We are] planning to turn on commercial service in New Zealand soon, once Starlink receives FCC commercial authority shortly,” said SpaceX.
One NZ will only launch its full service when a message can be sent or received within minutes. In other words, MNOs will not launch commercial D2C services until “continuous coverage” is available. Starlink needs about another five or six launches to meet this criteria and then achieve near-global coverage. SpaceX currently has 246 D2C satellites in orbit. The last batch of D2C satellites was launched on October 16th.
However, Longmier’s statement, made via X, is buoyant although perhaps more than a little optimistic. The fact is that SpaceX (and its D2C strategy) is fighting on a number of fronts. One the one hand it has a suite of objections from a number of terrestrial cellular operators. It also has AST SpaceMobile complaining about risks of interference. Finally, it has to persuade the FCC to grant it permissions to operate.
Nevertheless, SpaceX remains very optimistic. It said: “This year, we look forward to expanding our testing to include greater coverage; launching hundreds of satellites to enable our text constellation; working toward our voice, data, and IoT constellation in 2025.”
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