Starlink's direct-to-phone service is about two years away

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 16:51

   to be honest um i saw in the trades that you spent about 17 billion dollars on some spectrum and that um yeah um so some couch change um to enable your satellites and the starlink network to connect directly with phones what will that look like in a year or two are we going to drop our Verizon account and just expand our Starlink account? We're kind of hoping because Verizon kind of sucks. How many of you want a Starlink phone?

2. 17:27

   Who wants a Starlink phone? Is it technically possible? Elon, I know you can't see it, but it's everyone. Yeah, it's everyone. All right, cool. So this is kind of a long-term thing. It will allow SpaceX to deliver high bandwidth connectivity directly from the satellites to the phones, but there are hardware changes that need to happen in the phone. So since these frequencies are not supported in current phones, the chipset has to be modified to add these frequencies.

3. 18:09

   And that probably is a two-year time frame. So the phones that are able to use the spectrum that was acquired probably start shipping in around two years. And then we also need to pull the satellites that are going to communicate on those frequencies. So in parallel, we're building the satellites and working with the handset makers to add these frequencies to the phones. And then the satellites and the phones will then handshake very well to achieve high bandwidth connectivity.

4. 18:39

   But the net effect is that you should be able to watch videos anywhere on your phone. Wow. That's going to be crazy. And do these frequencies, would they work indoors inside buildings, you know, like your phone currently does? Okay. and so will you be able to have basically like if you if you're in a building with it with a like a thick metal roof then no but no the same the same types of yeah yeah normal normal homes yes yes elon is your vision for this that instead of you know having an at&t account or and then roaming when you're in the uk or you're in india it's just we could have one direct deal with starlink it works all over the world eventually not today but at some point is that the end goal that basically, we don't need a regional carrier, we have a global carrier, and that would be you?

5. 19:30

   That would be one of the options. To be clear, we're not going to put the other carriers out of business. They're still going to be around, because they own a lot of Spectrum. But yes, you should be able to have a Starlink, like you have an AT&T or P-Mobile or Verizon or whatever, you could have an account with Starlink that works with your Starlink antenna at home with Wi-Fi as well as on your phone.