According to BusinessWire, AST SpaceMobile partnered with AT&T to make satellite call using an unmodified smartphone. The testers picked Galaxy S22 Ultra to perform the operation of creating history as the phone doesn’t have integrated hardware to do so.
Using the BlueWalker 3 satellite, the unmodified Galaxy S22 Ultra successfully achieved the honor of making the world’s first voice call from Texas to another phone at destination (Japan), which is far away. As the test is considered successful, many other regular phones can feature satellite calls in the near future.
Signals originating from the Galaxy S22 Ultra in Texas, USA, first reached BlueWalker 3 satellite and then redirected to the other smartphone in Japan. An unspecified AT&T spectrum was used as a middleman, and that is the reason why it worked without any special hardware inside the smartphone. The phones successfully exchanged SIM and network information through the Bluewalker 3 satellite. This means that any LTE smartphone can be used to make satellite calls in a similar fashion.
