AST SpaceMobile claims it achieved a 5G connection for voice and data between an unmodified smartphone and its BlueWalker 3 satellite in space.  The company announced Tuesday that its engineers made a call from a wireless dead zone in Maui, Hawaii, to a Vodafone engineer in Madrid, Spain, using AT&T spectrum and AST SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker…

PARIS — Direct-to-device, satellite-to-cell, NTN/non-terrestrial networks — the satellite industry hasn’t come to a consensus on what to call this type of connectivity, but players are making bold projections for its potential revenue and impact.  The term direct-to-device is too “inside baseball,” Lynk Global CEO Charles Miller said Tuesday during a panel at World Satellite Business…

Amazon’s Project Kuiper landed a deal with multinational telco Vodafone to expand 4G and 5G services to Vodafone’s customers in Europe and Africa.  The companies announced the deal Tuesday, with Vodafone pitching it as a way to bring high-speed broadband to unserved and underserved communities without the cost of traditional fiber build-out.  When Kuiper is…

The first O3b mPOWER terminal built for Galapagos telco CNT was inaugurated last week, SES recently announced. This comes after CNT recently signed a deal to increase its capacity agreement with SES from 1.5 gigabits per second to 2.5 gigabits on the O3b constellation, with plans to migrate to O3b mPOWER.  Ecuador’s Minister of Telecommunications…