On august 25^th, 2022, SpaceX & T-Mobile announced a partnership where any T-Mobile customer can have connectivity in their existing phone in cellular dead zones through Starlink V2 satellites. The key takeaways are: 

1. The service will work with your existing phone, utilizing the phone’s existing supported wireless antennas and channels; essentially these satellites are cell towers in the sky. It will be as convenient as keeping the phone inside your pocket, sitting inside your car and still having signal in an area without any terrestrial cell tower coverage.  

2. 2-4 Megabit capability for the one satellite cell, simultaneously thousands of voice calls or millions of text messages capability under one cell. 

3. They are planning to make certain messaging apps higher priority compared to other apps on the network, this will require deep involvement from those messaging app companies to optimize the app to get this priority in packet queues.  

4. The service is scheduled to launch sometime in 2023. 

5. On the most popular T-Mobile plans, this service will be included by default. 

6. The partnership is planning to expand to all over the world with reciprocal roaming.  

Twitter acquisition by Elon Musk got Completed on October 27, 2022. These are the things Elon Musk wants to do with twitter according to his publicly made comments: 

1. Prioritize Free speech in the platform based on existing legal framework of USA, and reduce political bias in content moderation. 

2. Make payment verified users with monthly subscription fee, users get the blue checkmark along with several power tools. Verified user’s content will rank higher in twitter compared to unverified. The stated goal of this  is to make it expensive to run bot accounts, also to share this revenue with content creators.

4. Make an WeChat like payment app called X. Mr. Musk wrote a Product plan in 2000 for paypal, that never got executed, he is going to execute it with some improvements. According to musk executing the plan will make twitter “the best financial platform” in the world. 

5. Have different content modes in twitter from which the user can choose from, ranging from non aggressive to aggressive mode with increased level of debate and conversation possibilities. 

Here are some more context regarding the state of twitter and Starlink before I get into speculation. 

• Twitter currently has about 250MLN Daily active user. Facebook has about 2BLN, so clearly there is room for growth for twitter as a social media. 
• Twitter has been used previously to implement American defense agenda and to topple govt, remember Arab Spring? 
• Starlink has been too, the Ukraine military and govt is now completely dependent on Starlink as the only reliable communication backhaul, losing Starlink will mean losing communication and coordination with all their ground forces. 
• Starlink has also been smuggled to Iran during their recent anti hijab protest and internet ban. Elon Musk shows every intention to distribute tools to empower free speech all over the world, defying foreign govt, with the support of American politician. 

With the above context, imagine this, instead of smuggling in pizza size Starlink dishes, it will be much effective if all the smartphones of Iran could directly talk to Starlink V2 satellites. Imagine this happening in Russia, or China, or any other country US Govt wants this to happen. Literal speech is one level of free speech, paying for what you believe in is another level. That’s why people say put your money where your mouth is. 

Literal speech is one level of free speech, paying for what you believe in is another level.

Starlink being a wireless technology, has throughput limits. To maximize profits, you need to ensure the most valuable data packets are always prioritized. So what “Should be” the priority order? This is what my common sense tells me: 

1. Payment 

2. Text 

3. Voice 

4. Image 

5. Video 

6. Other Blobs 

There has been talks about a global digital dollar vs digital yuan, some say China will take this global inflation opportunity to spread their currency in BRICS nations. The real technical problem of implementing a global digital payment system is Internet connectivity. If you break it down further the steps to solve are: 

1. A secure database and encrypted communication channel for all payment participants. The database can be centralized like traditional payment system, or decentralized like a blockchain based one. 

2. Highly available internet connectivity when the payment is taking place. People have tried doing offline payment, but nobody has successfully scaled it till now, at least the merchant has to be connected. 

3. To give access to everyone, across country borders. The key promise of decentralized cryptocurrencies is anybody in the world can signup and use, and it is widely accepted, not being subject to country regulation. Just look at how paper USD is being used in Srilanka when their own currency has failed due to hyperinflation. 

Starlink and twitter will be the best way for USA to distribute their Central Bank Digital Currency. USD is already trusted around the world, but it is not accessible by everyone. A global payment system that can be accessible by any smartphone in the world literally anywhere in the world is how twitter is going to play out. Once you have access to payment, all forms of financial services and e-commerce becomes possible too, this is how an USD based globally accessible WeChat clone gets implemented. And ya, for payment and text, I reckon Twitter will be free on Starlink. This use case is so obvious that if twitter doesn’t do it, some other messaging app such as Telegram or Facebook Messenger is going to cut a deal with Starlink and do it; both of these projects have whitepaper on how to implement a cryptocurrency in their system. But most likely twitter is going to be the first to do this as Elon Musk needs to recoup twitter’s investment as fast as he can for his investors.

Very close to this concept is how smartphones get upgraded to enable this. Here are a few ideas on what newer generation Android smartphones might have: 

• Antennas dedicated to reaching satellites, just like apple is doing with their new smartphone, this will significantly increase the bandwidth throughput. 
• Probably will have more access to the lower OSI level to optimize sizes of data packets of certain apps working with satellite networks. It is an OS level feature, and currently android doesn’t give much access to layer 3 network and below, causing oversized packets. 
• A separate chip to hold the private key or your payment ids in a secure manner. I think if Starlink issues its own E-SIM, they can merge the currency with the network’s airtime balance at the same time. This also allows customer onboarding less subject to govt intervention, imagine Iran. 
• The phone must have an app store that allows for apps to be installed without being charged by play store. Current 25% charge by App store and 15% charge by play store significantly limits Twitter/Starlink’s capability to reach its full value. Elon Musk has previously dubbed Apple App Store fees as the “Global de facto tax on the Internet”. You can bet Elon Musk’s internet has no place for this.

Apple app store fees are a de facto global tax on the Internet. Epic is right.

Elon Musk on a Twit

There have been speculation about a Tesla phone for a while. A smartphone does not go with the mission of Tesla which is “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”, however this does align with the mission of making both Twitter and Starlink highly profitable.  I have a feeling the existing smartphone ecosystem will see clearly their extinction if they do not comply with the above requirements, and fall in line. Starlink/Twitter ultimately will not have to get into the smartphone business. 

Here are some of the other benefits Elon Musk and his companies make out of this. 

1. Musk wins hardcore patriotic allies, which includes Senator, Congressman, Military top brass. These make it much easier to land deals with Nasa and Military, and thwart political campaigns against him.

2. Musk really wants to one up the SEC, with the most effective distribution channel of a US CBDC, he gains significant bargaining power over SEC as well. 

3. I think he genuinely cares about free speech, this guy loves twitter and its mode of communication, he once made fun of it by saying “Twitter is a warzone”.

4. He definitely has a grudge against the some of the Paypal gang as they didn’t execute his past plan, he was ousted from the Paypal management when he was in a vacation, so he had a vision regarding the financial industry 22 years ago, why not execute it now. 

5. This sort of demonstrates to the world how Starlink can be valuable for the masses, prompting every communication company in the world to bid for higher prices for priority in the network. Revenue from Starlink goes into funding the Mars Mission, maximizing profit here was always the goal. 

These are the primary risk and limitation of this whole endeavor: 

1. Acting against nation states gives those states incentive to start target practice and shoot down few of those satellites passing by, might cause a Kessler syndrome. 

2. The main body of the starlink v2 satellite is about 7 meters long, with antennas being roughly 25 square meters on each side. Starlink V2 is meant for Starship, too big to fit in a falcon 9, so the full capability rollout will have to wait till Spacex figures out Starship getting to orbit, which might take longer than expected, Spacex is finding it hard to run test launches from Boca Chica due to FAA permit requirements. 

3. To give a perspective of sheer technical difficulty of this, a signal from the phone has to travel 500 miles in the sky and reach a satellite that’s travelling at 17000 miles an hour, and it is thrown from a phone antenna thats not designed to do so. 

Spacex & Starlink will ultimately have to get a missile defense system to keep their network up with high availability. Though I do not see how they are going to get it done effectively.  

PS: I write these blogs very quickly, usually when I have a break day and have couple of hours to spare, so thorough referencing of some of the numbers and facts are not possible, i write them out of memory, you will see lot of grammar and punctuation errors as well. Some of the questions that I will like answered in this context are. 

1. What is the exact coverage area under one Starlink v2 satellite?  

2. How much access will third party developers have in the upcoming WeChat like X app, and the Starlink system? 

3. How far has space debris cleaning technology gone? This will be one of the key factors in keeping the Starlink system up during times of conflict.