You referred to Alok Tripathi in your comment. Here are a couple of excerpts from his reaction to Morris’s article.
“Cell phones are also incredibly difficult to connect to satellites hundreds of kilometers away given a mobile phone’s low antenna gain and transmit power. Starlink satellites with the Direct to Cell payload are equipped with innovative new custom silicon, phased array antennas, and advanced software algorithms that overcome these challenges…”
SpaceX GPU AI-RAN on Ground?
Driven by custom SpaceX-designed silicon and phased array antennas, the next generation of Starlink Mobile satellites - V2 - will support thousands of spatial beams and higher bandwidth capability, enabling around 20x the throughput capability as compared to the first-generation satellite.
Musk may be a big fan of NVIDIA GPUs for orbital Al-DCs, but I suspect he would trust his purpose-built custom ASICS for satellite RAN-and would likely lean towards the same approach for terrestrial cell towers."
Conclusion: in this case as well, Nokia’s opportunities lie rather in Musk’s space data centers than in Starlink.