SpaceX granted D2C patent
October 8, 2026

By Chris Forrester



The US Patent Office has issued a patent (12,757,141 B1) to SpaceX covering how satellites communicate with cellular phones on the Earth’s service.

A Starlink satellite links to multiple phones on the ground through many narrow beams at the same time. A phone near the centre of the satellite’s beam is somewhat closer to the satellite than a phone at the edge of the beam, so its signal arrives a fraction sooner. Cellular networks expect those arrivals to line up. If they do not, calls and data can slip out of step and calls can be dropped or interrupted.


This patent shows how SpaceX fixes this potential problem. For each short slice of time, the satellite measures how long the signal takes on every beam, using the distance from the satellite to a reference point inside that beam’s footprint. It then holds the faster beams into a buffer for a few milliseconds (‘the buffer delay time’) and just long enough that every beam matches the slowest one. The phone sees one steady delay instead of a mix of delay/non-delay signals.

The patent covers the satellite computer and the phased-array antenna that do this, plus the link from the satellite through a gateway into a normal mobile carrier’s network.

The solution was engineered by four staffers at SpaceX.