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Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro phone uses 3 GEO satellites from China Telecom
By Linda HardestySep 22, 2023 12:44pm
The thing that makes the Mate 60 Pro unique is that it offers satellite voice capability in a regular smartphone format. (Huawei)
A few weeks ago, when Huawei unveiled its new Mate 60 Pro smartphone, the telecom industry was surprised to learn that Huawei may have developed its own 5G chip even though it doesn’t have access to some important Western chip-making technologies. But also surprising was the fact that the Mate 60 Pro can make and receive satellite calls.
Huawei says the Mate 60 Pro satellite capability only works with China Telecom’s network.
Analyst Blaine Curcio, founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting, said China Telecom uses three geosynchronous (GEO) satellites deployed by Tiantong. He said the satellites offer coverage of China plus most of Eurasia and the eastern half of the continent of Africa.
Of course, GEO satellite phones have been around for quite some time. Analyst Tim Farrar, president at TMF Associates, mentioned Intelsat and United Arab Emirates-based Thuraya, which both offer satellite phone communication services.
But the problem with GEO satellite phones is that they have really large antennas, making the phones bulky. For its part, Thuraya invented a “sat sleeve” for people to use their existing smartphones. According to Thuraya’s website, the “SatSleeve+ is the fastest way to transform your phone into a satellite smartphone.”
The thing that makes the Mate 60 Pro unique is that it offers satellite capability in a regular smartphone format.
Fararr said of Huawei’s phone on China Telecom’s network, “This is their satellite service with a high-power chipset and what seems likely to be an internal antenna in the phone. But you have to be quite careful about pointing the phone in the right direction. It’s got a picture on the screen like the Apple [iPhone] where you keep the satellite in view.”
He speculated that the satellite capability on the Mate 60 Pro would require an earpiece to keep the radiation from the antenna away from the user’s head.
Curcio said, “An antenna that’s going to communicate with geosynchronous satellites that are 22,000 miles away is going to be a more powerful radio wave received by the phone.”
Fierce Wireless reached out to Huawei for clarification on whether users needed a special earpiece. And we’ll update this story if Huawei responds.
iPhone satellite capability
While China Telecom uses GEO satellites, Apple’s newer-model iPhones use low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites from Globalstar. And the iPhones can’t make or receive phone calls. The satellite capability is only for emergency texts.Curcio said because iPhones work with LEO satellites, “they can only see a small surface at one time.” The user must line up the phone with an orbiting satellite, and the satellite also has to see a ground station. “But these GEO satellites can see the entirety of China, so getting a signal should be less difficult,” said Curcio.
Of course one tradeoff of using GEO satellites is that they’re so far way it’s going to be difficult to get decent broadband data throughput. Farrar said, “It’s obviously very low bandwidth. But it’s a step up from what we’ve seen with the iPhone.”
Huawei isn’t the only Chinese phone maker working on satellite capability. In January, Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon satellite communication solution. And in February, it said it was working with some Chinese phone makers including OPPO, vivo and Xiaomi, leveraging its Snapdragon Satellite.
AST SpaceMobile
In other mobile-to-satellite news, this week AST SpaceMobile said that on September 8 it made the first 5G satellite-to-mobile call. AST engineers placed the call from Maui, Hawaii, to a Vodafone engineer in Madrid, Spain, using AT&T spectrum and AST SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker 3 test satellite.AST plans to launch five LEO satellites in 2024. But it will take awhile to cover the Earth. Scott Wisniewski, AST’s chief strategy officer, told Fierce Wireless in November 2022 that AST’s plan calls for 168 satellites.
Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro phone uses 3 GEO satellites from China Telecom
A few weeks ago, when Huawei unveiled its new Mate 60 Pro smartphone, the telecom industry was surprised to learn that Huawei may have developed its own 5G chip even though it doesn’t have access t | The thing that makes the Mate 60 Pro unique is that it offers satellite voice capability in a...
