(Credit: chombosan/Getty Images)
BARCELONA—Skylo has the smallest presence in the US satellite-messaging market of any company and has the toughest job: Instead of relying on satellites in low Earth orbit, its hardware resides on other companies’ spacecraft in geostationary Earth orbit, 22,000+ miles up.
But in a conversation at MWC Wednesday afternoon, Skylo CEO Parthsarthi Trivedi charted a path to deliver not just texts but calls and a moderate amount of data from that far-off perch in space. "We should expect data to be something that is also rolled out for consumer devices," he said. "It will be a constrained pipe, so we will have to be very clear about the expectations we are setting for that service."
(The idea that a pocket-sized computer can reliably send even a text message to a moving satellite is one of those things that my Generation X brain struggles to grasp.)
The reality of Skylo’s service on Pixel 9-series phones and Verizon Galaxy S25 phones, the only devices to support its satellite-specific spectrum, has been limited to free-for-now emergency messaging until this week. On Tuesday, Google announced that its next batch of feature updates would support everyday text messaging to non-emergency folks on those Pixel phones for T-Mobile and Verizon.
That, Trivedi clarified, is SMS only, not RCS, so people using this messaging option won’t have their texts encrypted in transit and will lose out on such added features as indicators when the other person is typing. (See also, the Google Voice texting experience.) He declined to comment on Google’s plans.
Trivedi said Skylo is already seeing widespread use in the US, with notable bumps during natural disasters like the wildfires around Los Angeles. "We saw a lot of spikes in traffic during those events,” he said, adding that he appreciated being able to lend some measure of help. “That, to me, is so gratifying as an entrepreneur and an engineer.”
Trivedi said data is already flowing through that distant connection to Skylo's Internet-of-Things customers, saying “that makes it super-easy for developers to create new applications.”
Skylo, like Globalstar, uses wireless bands cleared worldwide for satellite use, which simplifies its regulatory problem while complicating its work with wireless carriers and device manufacturers. "We can work directly with the OEM," Trivedi said.
He pitched the rollout of voice and data as something that would be seamless to customers: “It should be a service that you should expect to use without even knowing about it.”
PCMag’s testing hasn’t borne that out yet, with a five-second wait to see a message from a Galaxy S25 at Skylo’s Mountain View, California, headquarters transmit to Garmin’s emergency-messaging server.
Geostationary Earth orbit imposes a latency penalty that Trivedi said Skylo can get down to 400 milliseconds—below half of what you see on inflight Wi-Fi delivered via “GEO” satellites—an added lag that he chalked up to the multiple hops that data takes.
Trivedi drew on his own experience as a wireless customer in the Bay Area to suggest the demand for space-delivered fill-in coverage. "I don't have reception for 300 yards between my driveway and my neighborhood,” he said, adding that “It turns out to be a zoning problem.”
His summary of Skylo’s pitch to carrier partners: "The carrier gains the benefit of, hey, my coverage map is 'yes.'"
What those companies would charge their customers for this convenience, something Google and Samsung have left up in the air, would be another thing. Trevidi suggested some would offer it “as an insurance possibility" while others would sell day passes.
He also raised the possibility of Skylo using its technology and spectrum on satellites in lower orbits. "Our architecture is fundamentally software-defined and is built to take advantage of the best-in-class constellations that come online,” he said. “It's not hard-coded for geo.”
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