T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert recently announced that the company’s T-Satellite service is expected to launch nationwide on 23 July.
Mike Katz, president of marketing, strategy and products, said the T-Satellite service provisioned by Starlink will officially launch next month to provide service across more than 500,000 square miles that are not connected by traditional cell towers.
“We have 657 [Starlink] satellites in orbit supporting real customers with this service today”, Katz said. “We’re also the first and only mobile provider that has a cellular-to-satellite service that allows you to automatically connect without doing anything”.
Katz explained 75 per cent of the phones used by T-Mobile customers will work on the satellite service. “Pretty much any phone that was manufactured over the last four years works on T-Satellite,” he said.
T-Mobile is wrapping up its beta test of the satellite service with more than 1.8 million users, including hundreds of thousands of customers from AT&T and Verizon. Verizon and AT&T customers need eSIM-capable and unlocked phones to access the service, but they don’t need to switch to T-Mobile
During the beta, more than a million messages were sent from remote areas of the US without traditional cellular service. “One of the things that we’ve seen during the beta is customers send many more messages than they send,” Katz said. “In fact, three times more.”
The satellite service will be included at no additional cost for subscribers of its Go5G Next and Experience Beyond plans while everyone else, including AT&T and Verizon customers, will pay $10 per month. The service will support SMS for both Android and iOS devices as well as picture messaging and short audio clips. On 1 October, a data service will go live. On the same date in October, Katz said the operator will also be “making 911 texting available to all customers on all networks, as long as they have a compatible phone”.
“Also, today we’re announcing we are welcoming any developer who wants to optimise their app and bring it to our customers on our satellite network can do so,” Katz said. “The SDKs are available from Google, the APIs are available from Apple, and open to app developers today.”
In addition to Apple and Google, T-Mobile is working with AccuWeather, AllTrails, WhatsApp and X on developing satellite-enabled apps.
Source: Mobile World Live
Image Credit: Stock Image/T-Mobile