A network does not have to be absent to be useless
BlackCircuit is built for the hours when connectivity is bad rather than missing — and it handles that without asking anybody to choose a network.
Six ordinary ways a link stops working
Only the first of these is a coverage problem, and it is the only one a coverage map will warn you about.
Rural gaps
The valley, the forestry track, the far end of the site. Known, and the easiest case to plan for.
Indoor dead spots
Plant rooms, basements, substations, steel-framed buildings and vessel interiors. Full bars outside the door, nothing inside it.
Local outages
A mast down, a backhaul cut, a power cut that outlives the site's batteries. Everything looks normal until nothing sends.
Damaged infrastructure
The same storm, flood or fire your team is responding to is often what took the network out.
Congestion
An event, a crowd, a motorway at a standstill. The phone shows a strong signal and the data goes nowhere.
Everybody calling at once
In a disaster the network is saturated by the public before your team gets a turn on it.
Automatic, and not a mode somebody has to pick
There is no Wi-Fi, cellular or satellite setting in BlackCircuit for an ordinary user to get wrong. The phone and the network decide which bearer is available; BlackCircuit decides what is worth sending over it. The alert goes first on every link. The conversation follows. History comes down last, and only when there is room for it.
When a usable link returns, BlackCircuit catches up on what was missed, in the background, without a sync button and without a separate offline mode. The person using it carries on raising alerts, acknowledging them and messaging their team in exactly the same way.
Observability, not a mode selector. BlackCircuit will report what actually happened — the kind of connection a phone last reported, what is still waiting to send. That is there so an operator can explain a delay, not so anybody has to make a decision mid-incident.
Current direct-to-device landscape — checked 2 October 2026
Ordinary phones can now reach satellites directly on a growing number of networks. These are the services we are currently tracking, grouped by what the operator itself says is live. It is not a list of every direct-to-device network in the world, and it is not a roadmap.
Carrier, device, operating-system, plan and app support varies. A listed D2D service is not a claim of BlackCircuit validation on that network.
Satellite app and data access the operator describes as available
| Where | Service | What the operator says is live |
|---|---|---|
| United States | T-Mobile T-Satellite | App data over satellite, for satellite-optimised apps. |
| Canada | Rogers Satellite | Satellite-ready apps, alongside satellite messaging. |
| New Zealand | One NZ Satellite Data | App data over satellite. One NZ states that it does not approve or certify apps and that developers validate their own. |
| Japan | au Starlink Direct | Data for the apps au lists as supported. |
| Japan | SoftBank Starlink Direct | Data for the apps SoftBank lists as supported. |
| Japan | docomo Starlink Direct Developer guidance |
Data for the apps docomo lists as supported. |
| Australia | Telstra Satellite | Data for Telstra's Select Satellite Apps. |
| United Kingdom | O2 Satellite | Data for supported apps. O2's developer guidance points at Apple and Google's own mechanisms and offers help and testing, rather than a separate O2 certification regime. |
| Chile | Entel with Starlink Direct to Cell | Supported apps over satellite, with fallback handled automatically by the network and the phone. |
| Peru | Entel with Starlink Direct to Cell | WhatsApp and data for compatible satellite-optimised apps. |
| Philippines | Globe and TM with Starlink | Live for messaging, apps, calls and navigation on Android and HarmonyOS. Globe does not currently list iOS as supported, so this is not a path for an iPhone today. |
| Kazakhstan | Beeline Starlink Mobile | Live on Android for internet access and SMS. |
Running, but a trial or restricted to messaging rather than app data
| Where | Service | What the operator says is live |
|---|---|---|
| Ukraine | Kyivstar Light Data | Test access to a short list of services — Viber, WhatsApp and Google Maps — rather than general app data. |
| France and supported roaming countries | Orange Message Satellite, over Skylo | Commercial direct-to-device SMS and geolocation. Not general app data. |
Nothing listed here today
We keep this category so that an announcement is never quietly mixed in with a service that is running. Everything above is live or in test on the operator's own account; nothing above is here on the strength of a press release about next year.
Two things worth reading twice. Several of these services are Android-only at the moment — the Philippines service does not currently list iOS as supported — and app data over satellite generally depends on the app being handled as a satellite-optimised app by the phone and the network. Where an operator publishes developer guidance it typically points at Apple's and Google's own mechanisms rather than at a certification regime of its own, and at least one operator states explicitly that it does not approve or certify apps at all.
The fallback is getting better; the product does not depend on it
BlackCircuit is not a satellite product, and it does not depend on any one carrier or on any one of the services above. It runs over the Wi-Fi and mobile links a phone already has, and where a resilient fallback exists on a given network, device and plan it can use it — automatically, and without the team doing anything differently.
If a direct-to-device path matters to a specific operation, the right answer is to test it on that carrier, those handsets and that plan rather than to read it off a table. That is what a field trial is for.