Why don't inventors make our cell phone signals travel the same way as gps does? Is it because of voice delay?

Question

Why don't inventors make our cell phone signals travel the same way as gps does? Is it because of voice delay?

Answer 1

No is the simple answer.

Satellite phones already exist, but are very expensive to use.

The limitation is that mobile phone calls require frequency and bandwidth, the more simultaneous calls you want to support the smaller your call cells have to be as the frequency range they use is limited (even with the digital calls sharing the same frequency) because of all the other things that use the frequency range.

To provide something approaching the call density of current mobile phone networks would require a very large number of satellites with huge numbers of antennas, these would be expensive to build and launch and very expensive to service and upgrade.

Answer 2

Its because GPS works by the satellites beaming down a signal through the atmosphere which is picked up by our GPS receivers.  Personal use GPS equipment don't have transmitters on them, cell phones need to transmit data.  

Also, in order to communicate with the satellites would also void one of the reasons for cellular technology in the first place - frequency re-use.  

There are phones which use satellites to communicate (good for remote locations) but are quite expensive phonecall wise.

What is more realistic and does happen is the cell phone talks to a nearby base station and that then communicates to a different network (satellite, PSTN or otherwise).