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.
