Does this phone make any direct connections to cellular towers?

And you have to emit radio waves into someone’s jurisdiction in order to do that. Those wavelengths are usually highly regulated, make no mistake that just because it’s a satellite you’ll get away from tracking. If the governing body requires the satellites beam back connections metadata for a given subscriber, they will.

Also, as far as I can tell, the satellites need to have a good idea of the position of the ground points, in order to perform beam forming towards them. I wouldn’t be able to tell how precise that is.

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