Iridium by Motorola was working in 1997 when I interviewed one of the team.

They had everything working, satellite to satellite call handover, line of sight handover, uplink and downlink, all the technology was great.

The only problem?

Billing. They couldn’t figure out how to make billing not be an international long distance call because local telcos refused to allow ground stations in their country.

Now Starlink is making agreements with those same telcos to allow direct to satellite mobile phone communication.