Just weeks after announcing a deal with AST SpaceMobile to support satellite-to-cellphone service, Verizon yesterday announced a separate deal with Skylo for a different satellite-to-cellphone service.
Telecompetitor had just spoken with Skylo’s chief product officer and co-founder, Tarun Gupta, last week about the company’s technology and got some additional information today from Srini Kalapala, senior vice president of technology and product development for Verizon, about the Skylo deal.
Initially, at least, the Skylo offering will only support emergency service — a capability that will be available early next year to customers who have cellphones supporting the appropriate connectivity. Later next year, it also will support text service. Importantly, the services will be available at no charge.
The recently launched Google Pixel 9 series of smartphones will support Skylo connectivity, and Samsung also plans to launch smartphones with Skylo connectivity.
Verizon made the deal with Skylo because the Skylo offering will be available before the AST SpaceMobile offering. The deal also came in response to a similar offering from Apple, Kalapala said.
“We saw Apple start with emergency service, with plans to have peer-to-peer messaging later this year,” he said. “The goal was to ensure Android customers can also get this capability.”
A Different Approach to Satellite-to-Cellphone Service
Skylo’s approach to satellite-to-cellphone service is different from the satellite-to-cellphone offerings that AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile all have announced but have not yet launched.
Verizon’s deal with AST SpaceMobile involves voice, text, and data service but service is not expected to launch for over a year. Verizon and AT&T both have deals with AST SpaceMobile that call for letting AST SpaceMobile use some of each wireless carrier’s spectrum to support satellite-to-cellphone connectivity, and T-Mobile has a similar deal with SpaceX to let SpaceX use its spectrum.
Using its own cellular spectrum to support the satellite-to-cellphone capability means that almost all phones in use by Verizon customers will be able to support the AST SpaceMobile offering, Kalapala said.
Where Skylo’s offering differs is that it doesn’t use cellular spectrum. Instead, it uses spectrum bands already in use by satellite operators — the S-band and the L-band, Gupta explained.
Skylo’s initial focus has been on making deals with cellphone manufacturers to enable the manufacturers’ cellphones to support connectivity in the satellite bands. The company’s ultimate goal, though, is to sell the service through wireless carriers — and the Verizon deal suggests that strategy could be successful.
“Our go-to-market path is primarily through mobile network operators,” Gupta said.
The service that Skylo initially will support is based on the non-terrestrial network standards (NTN) developed by standards body 3GPP. There are two NTN options and to date, the company has focused on the narrowband NTN standard (NB-NTN), which is based on the NB-IoT standard and uses 200-kilohertz channels.
Gupta noted, though, that Skylo’s technology also could support the NR-NTN standard that uses wider channels. That would, however, require enticing a chip manufacturer to offer the appropriate chips to enable wireless devices to support NR-NTN connectivity in the satellite bands.
It’s worth noting that Skylo isn’t a satellite operator. Instead, it makes deals with satellite operators to use the satellite operators’ spectrum to support what is essentially a separate Skylo network.
“We’re a network provider,” Gupta said.
It’s also worth noting that unlike the Skylo offering, Verizon’s AST SpaceMobile satellite-to-cellphone offering, and similar offerings from AT&T and T-Mobile, are unlikely to be available for free.
Kalapala said Verizon hasn’t determined pricing for the AST SpaceMobile offering yet, but said, “As satellite services become more advanced, we’ll look at multiple ways we can get customers to the right cost structure.”
