If you have the right Android phone but are in the wrong place for it to pick up a Verizon signal and send a text message to a friend, the carrier now has a fallback option that sends your message on a detour through space.
The Skylo satellite-to-phone service previously reserved for emergency messaging on Pixel 9-series and Galaxy S25-series phones now covers everyday messaging. Verizon subscribers with those phones may notice a lag before they have this option; its press release says the upgrades to enable this “will continue over the next two weeks.”
Using it may incur a brief lag due to the 44,000-mile round trip the data must take from a phone to the satellites that Skylo uses in geostationary Earth orbit, plus other network overhead. When we tested the emergency-messaging option on an S25 in February, the phone needed about five seconds to send a message after we pointed it properly skyward.
Skylo’s system only supports SMS, not the upgraded RCS standard, CEO Parthsarthi Trivedi told us at MWC. So even if you don’t brag about bouncing your texts off a satellite 22,000-plus miles up, your chat partners will know because these messages sent via space will also be sparse—devoid of typing indicators and higher-resolution multimedia, among other RCS refinements. (See also, the Google Voice texting experience.)
On Thursday, two cable operators that resell Verizon’s network, Charter and Comcast, announced that they were opening this same option to subscribers of their Spectrum Mobile and Xfinity Mobile services.
None of these announcements reference any charge for this roaming at any point. When Google announced the satellite-SOS feature for Pixel 9 phones, it said it would be free for the first two years. Apple, which made a similar pledge when it launched its Emergency SOS for the iPhone 14, eventually added another year of free service. Cupertino has yet to announce pricing plans for its satellite connectivity, even after making this roaming option more useful by including support for iMessage chats with non-emergency contacts.
T-Mobile users with Pixel 9 phones should be next in line to get expanded texting via satellite, to judge from the mention of both in Google’s early March Pixel Drop update. We asked T-Mobile when that might happen, but it did not have an answer today.
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All three national carriers have other satellite-connectivity upgrades in progress. AT&T, like T-Mobile and Verizon, also supports Emergency SOS on newer iPhones, which relies on satellite service from Globalstar. But that carrier and Verizon are also banking on the startup AST SpaceMobile’s plans to launch a small constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites that will offer not just messaging but voice and data service.
T-Mobile, meanwhile, has already opened messaging via SpaceX’s Starlink to beta testing for its subscribers. The service, which T-Mobile and SpaceX are lobbying for regulatory approval to upgrade to voice and data, will cost $15 more a month on all but T-Mobile’s most expensive plan. AT&T and Verizon subscribers will be able to subscribe as well but it will cost them still more, at $20 a month.
Customers of all three carriers may also have to factor in the cost of whatever qualms they have about sending their money to SpaceX’s politically polarizing, government-disrupting CEO Elon Musk.
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About Rob Pegoraro
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