SPACEX: Today, SpaceX was granted patent US 12,757,141 B1.
A Starlink satellite talks to phones on the ground through many narrow beams at once. A phone near the middle of a beam is closer to the satellite than a phone at the edge, so its signal arrives a little sooner. Cellular networks expect those arrivals to line up. If they do not, calls and data can slip out of step.
This patent is how SpaceX fixes this. 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 in a buffer just long enough that every beam matches the slowest one. The phone sees one steady delay instead of a mix.
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.