Building base stations in high mountains, grasslands, forests, deserts, and other terrains is costly and challenging, resulting in natural signal blind spots.

To overcome these limitations and achieve truly global coverage for mobile communication, the answer lies in satellite communication.

Currently, with 5G networks entering mature commercial stages and meeting the majority of user demands, satellite communication is still in its early stages of development. If it continues down its previous path of specialized, closed development, achieving widespread application and commercialization will be a long journey.

However, the integration of these two technologies holds the potential to become a new hotspot in the industry.

"Stand high, see far" – the timing is right for satellite communication deployment.

"Stand high, see far." Satellites in space possess powerful coverage capabilities. They can effortlessly achieve broad signal coverage using limited space resources. Regardless of whether the terrain below is prosperous or barren, flat or desert, signals can be spread across the earth without bias.

Satellite communication has long been applied in traditional satellite telephony, mainly for special fields such as deep-sea fishing and wilderness exploration. However, satellite phones often come with bulky antennas and expensive communication costs, making them not widely used in daily life. Unlike traditional mobile communication technologies that require phones to connect to base stations, satellite communication technology achieves communication through satellites.

There are currently two implementation methods for satellite communication: one is satellite phones connecting to satellites to communicate with other phones, as seen in traditional satellite telephony; the other is through NTN (Non-Terrestrial Network) technology, where satellites directly provide 5G connectivity services to the ground, enabling mutual communication between mobile phones.

The direct connection of ordinary mobile phones to satellites will completely overturn the coverage planning concept of traditional mobile communication.

In the future, the construction of ground mobile networks will only need to focus on the capacity and coverage demands in densely populated areas, as well as indoor coverage issues. The vast territories and spaces can rely on LEO 5G satellites for capacity and coverage. Compared to the traditional ground mobile network coverage construction model, the network construction costs will be significantly reduced.

It is understood that satellite communication technology can not only provide strong support for applications such as resource exploration, forest fire prevention, emergency rescue, adventure tourism, and wildlife conservation but also deliver "life signals" to areas such as remote mountains, forests, deserts, grasslands, and deserts that are not deeply covered by ground communication networks.

For economically underdeveloped areas, satellite communication can also provide fast and affordable internet access services, effectively helping to boost local economic vitality and eliminate the "digital divide."

At the same time, the "5G + satellite network" provides a more reliable remote communication method for devices, meeting the "ubiquitous" mobile communication demand, which aligns with the development vision of integrated wireless ubiquitous networks in the 6G era.

In the future, 6G will achieve convergence in six aspects: standard specifications, terminals, network architecture, platforms, frequencies, and resource management, including ground mobile communication and satellite mobile communication.

However, in terms of technology, key core technologies still need further breakthroughs. Currently, there are bottlenecks in "direct satellite connection for mobile phones." It is challenging to miniaturize the form of mobile phones to embed large satellite antennas, and mobile phone batteries also struggle to support high-power communication for extended periods.

In addition, achieving low-earth orbit satellite communication on mobile phones requires the customization of baseband chips to ensure the sensitivity of signal switching and transmission, increasing hardware cost input. Meanwhile, there are also challenges in terms of security. Mainstream low-earth orbit satellite communication will bring challenges in space network security supervision.