Android 15 phones can send text messages via satellite connection – Tablets and phones – News

I understand your reasoning but it is wrong! A transmission pole can certainly go further than 2.5 km and also happens in sparsely populated areas, but that is not the choice here because you then limit the capacity within that entire area to what that one pole delivers and here all the people are huddled together and they want as much capacity (speed) as possible, so more poles, smaller transmitters and therefore more frequency space, hence more bandwidth.

But with satellite it is a completely different story, polar or LEO satellites are probably used, i.e. which do not stand still as far as we see them and float at a relatively short distance above the earth (500-800 KM) think of GPS satellites or NOAA weather satellites, you can even hear them when they fly over on the scanner (radio receiver) or, for example, the International Space station. There are plenty of videos on YT where you can see how you can receive it yourself, which you can enjoy as a hobby, by the way.

But the idea is that in case of emergency you can send a small text message via satellite and that only works if you have line of sight, i.e. a view of the satellite that is passing over at that moment. So this won’t work indoors anyway and your connection is at most a few kilobits purely for sending an emergency message.

There are people who use the internet via Starlink, of course, that is also such a system, but they have a tracking dish antenna or flat antenna in a field or on their roof, but you cannot simply put such a thing in your smartphone. Moreover, your smartphone only uses a maximum of 2 Watts or so.