Qualcomm Technologies and satellite-communication company Iridium are working together to connect the chip giant’s Snapdragon smartphone chip to Iridium’s satellite constellation.

The text-message service will be made available later this year on any smartphone device containing a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, Francesco Grilli, VP of product management at Qualcomm, explained during a press briefing.

Grilli explained the Iridium constellation includes 66 satellites split into six different “planes” in north-to-south orbit, as well as nine in-orbit “spare” satellites to take position in the event of any failed primary satellite. This effectively means complete global coverage, according to Grilli, but the services will only enable emergency messaging and in some cases non-emergency "premium paid messaging" depending on provisions established by the partnered cellular service provider or over-the-top (OTT) provider.

Grilli said the text service is similar to the GSM SMS standard with the “methodology” and “protocol” being different – using time-division duplexing (TDD) technology in L-band frequency for both sending and receiving the messages. The “bandwidth that is dedicated to the satellite constellation is not compatible [with] the bandwidth that is dedicated to 5G networks, so it will not make a lot of sense to use 5G on this particular spectrum, at least for now," he explained.

Bryan Hartin, EVP for sales and marketing at Iridium, said the companies entered two agreements: one is a “collaboration agreement for the development to enable the satellite connectivity in a Snapdragon," with the other being the service provider agreement.

Under the latter agreement, Qualcomm takes over the service provisioning, working with OEMs and potential telecom service providers to embed Iridium satellite connectivity in various smartphone models. “It [would] be very complicated to have eight companies [each] get an agreement and all the test procedures, so we are trying to streamline everything,” Grilli explained, adding that the certification process will all be done through Qualcomm.

For telecom equipment providers, the process will be like buying a new feature from Qualcomm, Grilli said, adding “it’s just that this new feature may require some additional RF [radio frequency] testing because it's a new RF band. ... It's not a band that is already supported [by] other terrestrial operators. So unless the device is actually built with that frequency band in mind, you cannot do a software upgrade over the air to enable the feature. ... But it will be pretty straightforward from [the] OEM’s point of view, and I can see there are several OEMs already working on designs."

During the pre-briefing, Grilli rhetorically remarked: “So the question is, do you really point the phone to the sky? Well, yes and no.”

He explained that each phone is able to track a satellite in real time [with a margin error of only a few kilometers] and monitor the orientation of the phone through its built-in sensors.

This enables the technology to determine if the device is “actually pointing in the right direction. If not, the user will be asked to essentially turn around and maybe [in rare cases] lift the phone above their heads depending on the situation.”

This direction is similar to Apple's Emergency SOS service using its latest iPhone 14 devices.

Grilli said the Qualcomm/Iridium system will allow users to send or receive full text messages in between three and 10 seconds, whether it is provided by a telecom service operator or OTT provider.

While the announcement touted omnipresent connection, Grilli’s reiterated that this project is first looking to offer basic messaging anywhere in the world, but building a non-terrestrial network (NTN) capable of offering higher services will take “quite some time," a sentiment shared by satellite company Lynk’s CCO Daniel Dooley.