As fires continue to ravage the Los Angeles area, T-Mobile and SpaceX announced on Thursday night that they have turned on Starlink coverage for those who need it.
"Today T-Mobile and Starlink opened up T-Mobile Starlink Direct-to-Cellular service over impacted areas of Southern California to deliver wireless emergency alerts and SMS and enable 911 texting," the wireless carrier said. "While SpaceX's direct-to-cell constellation has not been fully deployed, we are once again temporarily making this early test version available for those who need it most."
The carrier says that its network has "held strong" and that it has also "restored roughly half of the sites that were impacted by commercial power loss."
"As conditions safely allow, our teams are evaluating impacted sites in Altadena, Duarte, Calabasas, Malibu, Fillmore and Agoura Hills, and continuing to deploy and refuel portable generators to sites until commercial power is restored."
The Los Angeles fires are the latest deployment of the new satellite feature to keep its users connected during a natural disaster. It previously enabled the service in response to Hurricanes Milton and Helene last year.
As it was with the hurricanes, texting over satellite will be limited to T-Mobile users with "supported phones." Wireless emergency alerts and evacuation notices, however, can be sent over the satellites to anyone in the affected areas regardless of their wireless carrier.
It's once again worth noting that this is SMS, or traditional text messaging, and is done through your phone's regular messages app. It won't work with internet-based messaging services or apps like iMessage, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. T-Mobile tells CNET that the supported devices include "most" Android phones and iPhones older than the iPhone 14 series.
Apple users with an iPhone 14 (or later) who are running iOS 18 can also send iMessages, regardless of carrier, over satellite in areas that they don't have coverage thanks to Apple's partnership with satellite company Globalstar. T-Mobile says that users with those iPhones will be using Apple's satellite services and not SpaceX's Starlink.
While it has used the service in emergency situations, the Los Angeles deployment comes shortly after T-Mobile and SpaceX announced that they would begin beta testing the service this year and opened up registration.