T-Mobile said its successful emergency alert test with Starlink means these warnings can now be sent to 500,000 square miles of rural, mountainous and/or uninhabitable land nationwide.
T-Mobile has successfully conducted a wireless emergency alert test via a Starlink satellite. The un-carrier said this is the first time a US wireless emergency alert (WEA) has been sent by satellite.
"This is one of those days, as the CEO of a wireless company, that makes me pause for a moment and reflect on how technology advancements and the work we're doing is truly impacting life and death situations," said Mike Sievert, CEO of T-Mobile, in a statement.
T-Mobile said the WEA test means emergency alerts can now be sent to 500,000 square miles of rural, mountainous and/or uninhabitable land nationwide.
The test alert – a hypothetical evacuation notice – was sent out at 5:13 PM PT on Thursday, September 5. After traveling 217 miles into space, the alert was received by one of Starlink's 175 direct-to-smartphone satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO). The alert was then broadcast back to a geographic area affected by the hypothetical alert and received on a T-Mobile smartphone. The whole process took only seconds, said T-Mobile.
The service provider said satellite-based WEAs will be critical in assisting emergency responders in natural disasters like the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California, which had a death toll of 86 people. The fire started in the rural Sierra Nevada mountains and burned over 150,000 acres, leading to the evacuation of 52,000 people and destruction of 19,000 structures plus the majority of the city of Paradise.
Residents had no access to emergency alerts due to a lack of wireless service coverage during the fire, which initially took out a reported 17 cell towers on the first day of the fire. A total of 66 cell towers were down within the first two weeks of the fire.
SpaceX plans to launch additional satellites during the next few months to further support wireless coverage. T-Mobile and Starlink are currently testing Starlink satellites to support direct-to-cellular service. T-Mobile said that once satellites are launched it will beta test the service before providing it commercially.
Other tie-ups target D2D
T-Mobile and SpaceX aren't the only team working on direct-to-device (D2D) satellite communications. This morning, AST SpaceMobile launched five BlueBird satellites that will be used to provide supplemental coverage to Verizon and AT&T's wireless customers. The satellites will use 850MHz lowband spectrum in combination with AST SpaceMobile's network, reported Light Reading's Rob Pegoraro.
Initially, AST SpaceMobile will use lowband spectrum to support beta test users for AT&T and Verizon, with a goal of reaching nearly 100% nationwide coverage from space with over 5,600 coverage cells in the US.
Verizon and satellite startup Skylo also partnered this month to launch a direct-to-device (D2D) communications service to deliver emergency SOS texting to some Android devices. That service is available now.
Apple already has an Emergency SOS service that began with the iPhone 14. Last month, Google announced that its Pixel 9 smartphones are the first Android phones to include Google's Satellite SOS emergency messaging services.
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