A secret new project allegedly underway at Apple reveals some of the enormous advances that could be made rather quickly in telecommunications worldwide.
A TechCrunch report today by Darrell Etherington talks about Apple hiring engineers and otherwise attempting to develop a satellite system that sends and receives data directly to and from user devices, citing a Bloomberg report:
“The (Bloomberg) report notes that this is an early-stage secret project,” Etherington writes, “that could still be scrapped, but that the purpose of the team and its work is to potentially develop communications satellite technology that can send and receive data directly to user devices, including the iPhone, in a bid to make it possible to connect Apple devices without the need of a third-party network.”
Imagine the benefits that such a system would bestow: right now, every cell phone telecom system relies on of the grid of terrestrial towers that provide reception in correlation to land proximity. With a pure satellite system, smartphone users could communicate anytime, anywhere, directly through beaming a signal up to the orbit zone and transmitting it back down.
Interestingly enough, Apple’s effort is not the only documented work on pure satellite systems to date.
Etherington cites earlier TechCrunch reports on a company called Ubiquitilink and its project that has already pioneered some of the design necessary – in fact, much of the design necessary – to make this happen.
Reports by Devin Coldewey early this year (in the same esteemed publication) show that the company overcame some of the major obstacles involved, but still wrestled with a Doppler effect and latency, which you would expect, given the distance that signals have to travel.
However, even though the problem seemed unsolvable at first, Coldewey reported engineering teams believe they have found a way around it.
Intuitively, it’s not hard to imagine using some sort of buffer system to deal with the latency problem. The idea that you could bypass these elaborate terrestrial networks and just use space satellites seems amazing – like something straight out of science fiction. The average consumer, though, would probably be most interested in how this type of engineering would affect the price and capacity of services.
In fact, part of the earlier report on Ubiquitilink showed how the company would not charge for emergency calls that would save lives.
“We don’t want to make money off saving people’s lives, that’s just a benefit of implementing this system, and the way it should be,” Ubiquitilink founder Charles Miller told TechCrunch, in a rare bit of an entrepreneurial nod to the common good.
It’s only a hop skip and a jump from there to start releasing the user from the current burden of shelling out hundreds of dollars per month for the privilege of using all of those local network towers.
However, there’s always the corporate ethos and interests to deal with – note Coldewey’s disclaimer that TechCrunch is actually owned by Verizon!
In any case, whether direct satellite transmission eventually gets built into public utility models or not, it puts us light years ahead on modern telecom, so keep an eye out for more on this.
