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Iridium Offers Data service - IRC From Anywhere!
quadra writes: "Iridium is now offering satellite data services. For the first time, dial-up and direct internet applications are available anywhere on the planet. Using a data kit attached to an Iridium phone you can either dial up a modem, or use direct internet connectivity. Speeds are rather modest (9600bps) but there's plenty of applications where that'd suffice." OK. I would happily pay $300 / month even for 9.6kbps, if it was unmetered -- I could ride my BikeE the world around with a headmounted display, a twiddler, and a solar-charged laptop in the cargo bin. But prices are hard to find on the Iridium website, which means I can't afford it.
Activation: $50
Monthly just-because fee: $19.99 to $289 (0 - 250 minutes included)
Per-minute
Per "data transmission" $1.09
anyway, one provider isn't afraid to quote prices online. You sort it out:
http://www.rentexpress.com/iridium/iridium_us_in.h tml
The article is wrong, Iridium DID offer some data services (they were pretty much still in development when the company went bankrupt though) that were quite unimpressive. Basically, it was a small dongle that attached to the bottom of the phone with an RS232 port on it that you could hook to a laptop. The phone emulated a fairly bare bones 2400bps modem. Unfortunatly the connection was basically just sending data over the same channel it normally sent digitized voice traffic (which is why people used to sound so tinny on those phones, their voice was being encoded at 2400bps!) which left you with rather high latency (~1 second round trip ping times for instance). Because the handoff wasn't perfected yet with the data traffic (sound worked a lot better) you would frequntly be disconnected after 8-15 minutes or so. Honestly, it wasn't fast or reliable enough to run pine over, although it was OK for ftping a mail spool file and opening it locally. Any sort of realtime interactive game is out of the question, and really anything online other than quick email or light web browsing (we had a little program that would proxy the web for us and compress the pages down for transmission over the satellite).
There is some good news though. The service is a lot better if you get out of the city (driving down 81 I was able to keep the connection running for nearly 20 minutes once) and it does work EVERYWHERE. Finally, you do get better data rates with this than many (most) other commerically avilable satellite services (ComTech (~24 bytes a second, several second latency), OmniTracs (~7-8 bytes a second, several minute latency), and others).
Next time you need to check your email in the middle of Africa, you will thank your lucky stars that Iridium exists though, since your choices are the cheap-by-satellite-comms standards Iridium, or a much heavier much bulkier much much more expensive satellite solution.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
According to this page, you have to contact one of their service providers to find out if there's an additional charge. Being that their prices in general are pretty f'ing high, I wouldn't be surprised it doubled the cost per month. Just a g
Geezus, Timothy, I think Taco may be paying you too much.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
The Iridium sats are in Low Earth Orbit so that they can get sufficient signal strength for a handheld device to connect. This means that the arctic regions are covered, and also that the network needs a lot of satellites -- which it has. Ping time is probably not good compared to landlinks but is nowhere near the delay you'd expect from geosynchronous.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I have heard of pirate radio stations that operate like this: A van loaded with a transmitter and other broadcasting equipment drives around a small area, say a few square miles. The F.C.C. always has a hard-on to catch these guys.
When the current incarnation of Iridium declares bankruptcy and threatens a satellite storm and is bailed out by the government and sold for pennies on the dollar, the new owners will be able to implement significantly higher transmission rates and sell the service at a bargain. People who pirate tunez, warez, or pr0n could locate themselves in a dense urban area, say NYC, and cruise around on a bike or on foot, broadcasting anything. The F.C.C. guys would be able to get GPS coordinates for the location, but if you factor in the error and the population density, it would be practically impossible to locate the perpetrator.
People tend to think technology will be used to enslave us, but here is a case of technology increasing liberty.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"