SpaceX has found its second partner for their upcoming Starlink-enabled direct satellite-to-cellular service. New Zealand’s telecommunications company, One NZ (formerly known as Vodafone), has announced it has signed an agreement with SpaceX to offer mobile coverage across the country, eliminating cellular dead zones. SpaceX announced the direct satellite-to-cellular service with T-mobile. T-Mobile has more than 109 million subscribers, of which 88 million are postpaid customers.
One New Zealand Group Limited, also known as One NZ (formerly known as Vodafone New Zealand Limited), is a New Zealand telecommunications company. One NZ is the largest wireless carrier in New Zealand, accounting for 40% of the country’s mobile share market in 2020. One NZ has 2.4 million customers. According to the Commerce Commission’s Annual Telecommunications Monitoring Report from March 2022, Vodafone’s market share in the mobile market was 38%, Spark 41% and Two Degrees Mobile 19%. The remainder of 2% the market is made up of mobile virtual network operators.
NEWS: SpaceX has found its second partner for their upcoming Starlink enabled satellite-to-cellular service. New Zealand’s telecommunications company, One NZ (formerly known as Vodafone), has announced it has signed an agreement with SpaceX to offer mobile coverage across the…
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) April 4, 2023
SpaceX Starship Could Launch April 10, April 17 or April 20
April 20 would be 420, but a lot of data points to April 10.
Here's a short thread on three things I think I know about Starship's orbital flight attempt:
1. Elon has been publicly pessimistic about launch dates of late, and April 10 is semi-real. Yes, we are living in an era of negative Elon time. Which is a wild place to be.
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) April 4, 2023
Do you check #Starship? It’s only 100k MCap.
Elon Musk hopes the maiden orbital launch of SpaceX's #Starship rocket will happen on April 20.
This will be the best token of April. Mark my words. @StarshipTokenio @PetaByteCapital @CryptoWizardd @AltcoinDailyio @cryptomanran
— Marc (@MarcPerezM) April 3, 2023
April 20th makes more sense. They might *try* and launch starship on the 10th but if elon has to wait 10 days to launch starship on 420 he will absolutely do so
— Robbie (@RotsoRobbie) April 4, 2023
Regular Falcon 9 launch on April 7.
Targeting Friday, April 7 for a Falcon 9 launch of the @Intelsat IS-40e mission to orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida. The 119-minute window opens at 12:30 a.m. ET → https://t.co/bJFjLCiTbK
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 5, 2023
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Direct to mobile device requires V2 which requires Starship being operational. Seems likely there will be a lot of systems adopting it when it’s proven and available. I’d think Twitter would be using it for text and especially for Elon’s X.com money transfer/payments/financial services features. The capacity to do money transactions as well as communicate on a phone anywhere on the planet would be an impressive selling point for a super-app.