Ongoing Wave of SCS Partnerships Seen Coming

"We're still in the early days here," Iridium CEO Matt Desch said. There are still device makers -- notably Samsung -- that haven't announced plans, he said. Also, expect more plans coming out about features and applications, and products hitting the marketplace, he said. Apple/Globalstar involves an SOS capability, but Apple is obviously investing with a wider array of capabilities in mind, he said.

"It's absolutely land rush time" for satellite operators, said Mobile Experts President Joe Madden. Non-terrestrial networks (NTN) enhancing terrestrial ones will be the norm in six to eight years, he said. Madden said one big driver of deals is the need to get satellites up quickly. MNOs have less reason to move fast because they can wait and see which satellite systems work best, and at least in the short term they can promote the Globalstar-enabled iPhone service, he said. MNOs, however, can't wait too long or handset makers or software companies could end up taking the lead in SCS, leaving fewer revenue opportunities for carriers, Madden said.

Samsung is more likely to join up with an existing partnership than go it alone with a satellite operator, Madden said. Northern Sky Research (NSR) analyst Lluc Palerm said Samsung is probably waiting until there's more clarity about 3rd Generation Partnership Project's Release 17, which included NTN standards. Samsung, which last month unveiled SCS modem technology, didn't comment.

"Clearly everyone is trying to position" themselves, with all the major MNOs looking at SCS and some testing it, said Nathan de Ruiter, Euroconsult Canada managing director. Emergency messaging is an occasional-use service, so it's unclear how many satellite systems the SCS marketplace can support, he said. If SCS is able to expand beyond narrowband-type services like emergency messaging, he said, "then maybe you get into different numbers." He said it could be five years before more wideband-type services potentially come to market.

The main bottleneck to expanding beyond narrowband services will be spectrum availability, Palerm said. An NSR back-of-envelope estimate said SpaceX's Starlink, with 10 MHz of spectrum, 144 satellites over the U.S. and 50 beams per satellite, would have a total capacity over the U.S. of 480 Mbps -- about enough to serve 2,400 users at wideband speeds. SpaceX didn't comment. Scaling up to be able to serve masses of end users requires a lot more spectrum, a lot more satellites or a lot more beams, Palerm said. SpaceX didn't comment.

Expect products to come to market this year, driven by 3GPP's Release 17, which could help drive SCS, Palerm said. Also this year, constellations will continue to raise funds, which could be more challenging due to the economy, he said. There also could be more data about the results of testing by satellite companies like AST SpaceMobile with its BlueWorker-3 satellite and SpaceX tests using its second-generation satellites, he said.

A big challenge of going beyond narrowband services is the form factor of the smartphone itself, we were told. Satellite phones are far more bulky and don't fit easily in a pocket, "but that's what you need to get reasonable data speeds," Madden said. That puts the onus on satellite operators to compensate with bigger constellations or larger antennas, he said.

Another question mark is SCS revenue streams. It will be years before SCS is a notable in that regard, Madden said. Emergency-type texting, with hundreds of millions of customers paying a nominal amount, perhaps 50 cents a month, would mean revenue in the billions, but that's not enough to support a handful or more constellations, he said. The iPhone/Globalstar service is a differentiator now, perhaps letting Apple sell more iPhones, but it won't be free forever, he said.