Digital Locations Reveals Technology Development Plan for Connecting Smartphones to Satellites

Digital Locations announced that its technology team at Florida International University is focused initially on solving the device side challenges of connecting smartphones to satellites.

“Late last year, Huawei and Apple released cellular telephones capable of texting on traditional satellite-communications networks,” said Digital Locations CEO Rich Berliner. “Two start-ups, AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global, also started building new low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks designed to reach conventional 5G cell phones outside terrestrial coverage. Now, T-Mobile and Spacelink are up and running, Qualcomm and Iridium say that they expect to expand satellite connectivity to cars, laptops and other devices. Unfortunately, all these connections will be limited to text messages and voice calls.”

Mr. Berliner continued, “What the world wants and what we intend to enable is high-speed Internet. Doing so, will require technical advance on both the satellite side and on the user device side (smartphone). Smartphones have very limited power and very small antennas which make it difficult to transmit and receive signals from orbiting satellites hundreds of miles up in the sky. Our tech team at FIU has chosen to take on those tough challenges and is pursuing a very novel approach.

Mr. Berliner further revealed, “Our view is that solving the smartphone technical challenges will be the key to unlocking the design of future satellite antennas. We can achieve significant commercial success by solving either the smartphone side challenges, or the satellite side challenges to enable high-speed Internet service. However, we believe that the smartphone side solution will be the most valuable piece of the puzzle.”

Source: Digital Locations media announcement