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SatPhones — Why Can't They Make It Work?
RedEaredSlider writes "Satellite phones aren't as clunky as they once were, and technology has made them more powerful. Gone are the days when satellite phones had to be accompanied by a suitcase. Yet to date, the field is littered with bold attempts at a phone that could be used anywhere, without depending on earthbound cell phone networks. Billions have been invested, with relatively little to show for it. Part of the answer is debt. TerreStar is only the latest casualty of a crushing $1.2 billion debt load. The company introduced its Genus phone last month, but is in the middle of Chapter 11 proceedings. It's unclear that the phone will sell enough to help TerreStar stay in business, especially when it carries a $799 price tag."
What other phone can boast of having a full audio archive of every single phone call you ever make, courtesy of the NSA? Carrying one of these puppies comes with the cool prestige of being able to hit on the classy girl at the bar with James Bond lines like "Either I *am* a spy, or I'm getting spied *on*--that's for you to decide, my darling."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That carries a huge delay penalty, which lowers the quality of a conversation significantly.
cause ya cannae change the laws of physics (captain)
I've worked in the industry for the past 7 years or so -- most of the support calls that came in were related to the fact that the phone would not work indoors or in a car. People were really confused and often angry when you told them they need to be outside to make a call. This is small fact is one of the reasons, not to mention the cost, that satphone adoption has been stagnant.
Sat phones are trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. Most folks are ok with terrestrial cellular service. If they need wireless comms outside that service area, it exists... it's just expensive. For something to be affordable it has to be mass consumed, and the masses just don't need it.
Saying that the problem is 'debt' is just another way of saying that the value of the service over traditional cell networks isn't enough to outweigh the enormous initial investment required.
Which makes sense. Satellites are enormously expensive and only a handful of people really get any benefit over a normal cell phone. For those who do find a benefit, there are more cost-effective ways of dealing with communication than launching dedicated satellites into orbit.
1. don't work indoors
2. cost a lot more than cell phones that do work indoors, show real-time video, run apps. etc.
Did I miss anything?
It's because satellites are WAY too big to carry around as a phone. That's what SatPhone means, right?
Maybe I'm missing some subtleties, but "why can't they make it work" doesn't sound like a real question. It sounds like a literary device where the author asks himself a question that he can then answer, without having to sound like he's just sounding off on an obvious subject that everyone already understands.
But if not, I can hazard a guess why sat phones haven't taken off. Cost. Putting satellites in orbit is exponentially more expensive than putting up terrestrial towers. It's always going to cost a LOT more than cell phones. Combine that with the fact that the market of people who NEED sat phones because cells aren't good enough is very small. So you end up with expensive infrastructure, plus very small user base, that equals enormous individual consumer expense.
Anyone shocked by this revelation? anyone other than RedEaredSlider at least?
I've looked into buying a pair of sat phones and using them for communication when in the forest/mountains. I would be more than happy to make that initial investment for the phones if I could buy minutes that don't expire in 30 days. I would only need the phones 2-3 times a year. It's the cost to use them that really hurts. Think of the number of people that would buy one if the minutes either never expired, or you could pay as you go. I can think of a bunch of people that would love one in case of emergency, but don't want too have to pay a monthly fee for something they will never use.
so lets see. Thuraya phones usually have a cell phone mode as well, the are small and reliable - Iridium phones also are small and some have integrated GSM phones as well - in my experience they work well, they could be cheaper but they do work.
I love a story that answers it's own question. No need to click and read, move along.
headline / question
SatPhones — Why Can't They Make It Work?
answer
it carries a $799 price tag.
Display some adaptability.
Look at the downside.
1. They will not work inside or in a car.
2. Cost.
The upside is they will work in places that don't have cell coverage which are now few and far between.
The use case is limited and the cost to put up satellites is high. Not only that but satellites just can not support as many users as cell sites+fiber.
The math only works out for things like ships, trains, aircraft over the ocean, news organisations, military, spies, aircraft, and scientists. Even the phones on planes tend to use ground towers because of cost.
They reason why the struggle is so simple. Small user base plus high deployment costs equals not a great market.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
While their cost in strict $/km^2 terms might actually be pretty reasonable, satellites are a pretty horrid form of infrastructure in most other respects. Maintenance is difficult, launches are costly and don't always go well, latency is inherently bad, capacity is low, signal strength can be an issue and so forth.
Therefore, anywhere with more than a relatively low density of people who aren't penniless and living in their own filth and an absence of militias blowing up cell towers with impunity already likely has a superior GSM network of some sort.
Satellite has its niches, they just aren't big enough to spread the fixed costs, thus making calls extremely expensive, which doesn't make the niche any bigger. At present, the only reason they exist at all is that foolish investors took a huge bath on the project and then the corpse was snapped up for pennies on the dollar(almost certainly just so that the CIA could continue to chat with their BFFs in assorted hellholes without interruption).
The Cr-48 is an unbranded testing device; its cost to the only people who can get them from Google is $0.
The actual costs of retail Chrome OS-based netbooks, which a couple of manufacturers have announced will be making and selling under their own branding, are not yet known, but I'd be very surprised (given existing netbooks and the fact that Chrome OS isn't going to need much in terms of hefty hardware) if the initial models were anywhere close to $450. I'd more expect the low-end of the initial range of products to be around $250 or lower.
The technology is expensive for the company to set up, it's also expensive for the user, and it provides a very niche service: ability to call people from the middle of nowhere, and from nowhere else.
If you're anywhere even relatively civilized there are cell towers that are much cheaper and convenient, and buildings inside which the tech doesn't work. If you do happen to be in the middle of nowhere you're either one of the 20 people working at some research station on the north pole or similar location, or are some sort of aborigine that can't pay for it anyway. Not a huge customer base there.
The only people I see this of being a real use for, in any quantities making it worthwhile to pursue, is the military market, with researchers that operate in very remote areas being a smaller secondary market.
Who else is really going to be away from a traditional cellular network for long enough to need such a phone, outside of military and research folks? It just doesn't seem like a reasonable product for 99.9% of the population.
I paid $549 for my Nexus One.
Virtually any top of the line cell phone costs 500 bucks if bought off contract.
I don't think cost of the device is the objection here.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Fucking SatPhones, why can't they make it work?
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
SatPhones -- Why Can't They Make It Work?
I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm using a satmodem right now, and clearly
They work just fine.
Christ, my 10-year Kyocera handset still works like a charm on the Iridium network. It even still holds a half-decent charge!
Using one is pretty basic
10 PEEK up
20 IF you cannot see the sky THEN GOTO some place where you can
30 DO make phone call WHILE patiently accounting for propagation delay in conversation
40 END
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
These guys are trying to buy Terrestar-1 and move it over Africa.
genius idea, if they can get the business plan figured out.
$799,- is just a bit more than a SIM-lock free iPhone costs. So the price is most probably not the problem.
-- Cheers!
--Massive launch costs (where do you think the debt came from?)
--Inverse square law, aka "Your base station is a helluva long way away, Pt. 1". Making a convenient hand held device that can get enough signal from something in orbit to maintain the required data speeds is not easy
--Lightspeed delays, aka "Your base station is a helluva long way away, Pt. 2" You get two choices. Near earth orbit, which means you have delays that are only slightly irritating and you have to launch a lot of satellites (see problem 1 above), or high orbit, which means you don't have to launch as many satellites, but delays long enough to be actually noticeable.
is that it is not mainstream, if any of the big cell cos were to start their own sat service and evolve a torrent like connector where they could easily switch between one or another to give you the ultimate coverage package, of which you could even say set up temporary accounts for the average joe blo that only would need it once in a while, so that month add a service extra for 100$ that guarantees your service even in the middle of the amazon or arctic, you would end up with a whole lot of people using it, making it even cheaper as things progressed. alas...it is the same death hd and blu ray are suffering...never having been able to really jump into the mainstream, you cant buy a blu ray disc to burn on under 5$ a pop, even though you get a 50gb data load you can burn unto it....it still is not cheap enough to be bought by the masses...so same thing with sat phones.
You need clear view to the sky and the distance is a problem.
TerraStar's blackberry knock off is dual band.. so it'll use the AT&T crapnetwork, and when it needs to, uses satellite (in times of no signal). I guess its useful if you're working remotely in some woods.. but for $800 for a Winmo6.5 device? I'll end up passing up on that one, if the high prices didn't twart me away already.
Oh never mind, they already have cell service, I suppose that had been a big market for sat phones
The problem is a misalignment of features with the market population. It seems they didn't do a very good job of market segmentation.
The technology is cool, and it's great if you're in the desert and need to communicate. But the traditional cell phone is better for the vast majority of people who need to make a phone call. For non-military use, the only time you really need a Sat phone is when you're in the middle of 'nowhere' without any phone infrastructure nearby. Most people are 'somewhere' the majority of the time, and because of the low cost and ability to work indoors, the plain old cell phone wins (or now smart phones with the added benefit of data/internet is also a tempting choice). I think the marketing term is that there is a high amount of risk/competition from "substitute goods/services".
So there's fewer Indiana Jones style archeologists conducting digs out in the Sahara, because fewer people will buy it, it has to cost more to cover the prices. Then you start to get a negative feedback loop from buyers because they fear the company will go out of business, who will buy less, which makes the company go out of business.
If I remember correctly from the Irridium case study (which I read a few years ago), they also didn't cover the whole world. So it still couldn't be used in Antarctica, further limiting where it could be used (don't quote me on that part, but I remember thinking it was something mind bogglingly silly like that when I read it).
Too bad they are filing Chapter 11. The costs aren't nearly as bad as the old services. I can handle $0.65 a minute for phone calls for satellite service. The older phones required you to take out a second mortgage to place a call. Here's more detailed info.
"It's been just shy of a year since TerreStar's Windows Mobile-based Genus was announced for AT&T, offering a unique combination of GSM / HSPA backed up with satellite capability for those times when you find yourself in the middle of nowhere; in fact, you may have assumed that it had already been released by now. After all, this isn't the phone for 97 percent of the population -- it runs Windows Mobile and still works in places where us soft city folk would never dream of going -- so odds are good you never bothered to follow up on it. Fact is, though, it's just now available for the first time today, so as long as you've got a line of sight to TerreStar's bird and a willingness to tolerate WinMo 6.5.3, you'll be able to make and receive calls throughout the US, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands and in the surrounding waters -- and it's all on one telephone number. Of course, having a single number eliminates the cool factor of being able to say "if you can't reach me, try my sat phone," but let's be honest: convenience wins here. Right now, the phone's only available to business and government users... and with $799 upfront for the phone and satellite service running $25 a month plus per-minute, per-message, and per-megabyte charges of 65 cents, 40 cents, and 5 dollars, respectively, that's probably for the best. Follow the break for AT&T's full press release. "
"...especially when it carries a $799 price tag."
Didn't this story answer itself with this last line?
Besides, the women I saw at the grocery store last week isn't going to pay this kind of money to yell into a sat phone about her husbands vasectomy. Oh wait, it won't work in the grocery store anyhow. Now that I think about it, all phones should be sat phones.
Latency does not matter (much) for low speed remote area internet access. There must be hundreds of applications. Anyone tried it?
I work in the aerospace industry and though I haven't been involved closely with any of the major programs (Iridium, Globalstar, TerreStar, SkyTerra, ...), I'm familiar with Thuraya which is apparently making a profit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuraya). As others have said, satellites cost a lot of money, and many large systems were thought up anticipating a given customer base and willingness to pay for monthly charge and minutes that just wasn't there by the time the systems were operational (I believe this was due to mis-predicting cellular network penetration).
At this point, I don't know if any non-GEO systems will be profitable in the future. GEO satellites are really expensive, but at least you only need 1 (with a spare) to server a pretty big market (like the Middle East, parts of Europe and Africa). The bummer about GEO though is in addition to latency, you may not have coverage in many situations (high latitude, obstruction from hills, trees, etc.). What I'd like to see is a LEO network with satellites as cheap as possible that provide store and forward text/data messages only. Orbital Sciences tried to get this market with ORBCOMM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbcomm), but I don't think their market ended up as big as they hoped for either. What you really need is just about every cell phone on the planet carrying the hardware needed to interface with the satellite (which means it has to be a small and cheap addition to standard phones). Then every user can opt to use the satellite system to receive or send email or text messages when outside of the terrestrial network (when you are willing to pay extra). I would think this is a fair amount of money to capture, but I haven't done any estimates. It would fit my customer pattern perfectly since I normally wouldn't want to pay a monthly fee, but I'd probably send a few 1 dollar emails if the situation required it. Whether the world aggregate demand is in the 100s of millions of dollars for revenue per year is the question.
"Why Can't They Make It Work?" was answered in TFA. Satellite phone service is capital intensive and has a small market.
In many industries you make up for capital costs by increasing the size of the market, but you can't easily do that with sat-phones. There are real constraints both in the number of satellites (there are more than 200,000 cell towers in the USA -- Iridium has 66 satellites to cover the globe) and in bandwidth. AT&T can use the same cell frequencies across the USA because they know that phones associated with a particular tower won't cause interference with those same frequencies a few miles away. (ok, CDMA and other spread spectrum technologies makes this more complicated but the same theory applies - there is a limited to how many users you can handle within a particular frequency band). A single satellite covers a huge area - whereas a cell site may cover a few square miles (or less), a satellite may cover many thousands of square miles.
Even if you could physically launch 100,000 satellites to give global satellite coverage and carefully tune their antennas to minimize overlap, unless you can find a geosynchronous orbit to park them in to concentrate coverage over populated areas, each satellite would still cover 2000 square miles or territory.
For someone who lives out in the boonie's, this may be the only solution for those who need some form of communication. Very few places who can't receive cellular service, cable, dsl, etc, have to rely on the satellite service. As many of us who have ever had to work with Hughsnet or any other satellite internet service... well it blows! The reason they are not as successful as cable and dsl is because of the cost of the service, the quality is poor (by poor I mean it fluctuates from time to time), not to mention they all use this fair use bandwidth limiter that once you exceed a certain bandwidth, they take away the high speed and leave you with the bandwidth of a 14.4k datafax modem. Think XM/Sirius satellite radio. Think of Direct TV and Dish Network. Satellite phones work similar to how we get our XM radio or DirectTV. My XM satellite radio goes out everytime I enter the parking garage or go through a tunnel. And DirectTV gets flakey during a storm. The reason hughsnet stays in business is partly because of people who live out in the middle of nowhere. There are no other options for them. If hughsnet was able to increase the quality of their service, reduce rates, and remove the whole fair use bandwidth policy, they might be able to compete with cable/dsl. Same with the satellite phone. Now it may be much cheaper to put up a cell phone tower as opposed to launching a satellite in orbit, but i have yet to see anything that makes the satellite phones any better than cellular phones as far as reliability. Now that I can walk into an elevator and still talk on the phone, I wouldn't want to have to go back to saying "hold on, i'm walking in an elevator. I'll call you back" because of reduced quality.
Is sat phone ownership illegal in China, Iran, etc.? More to the point, do the sat phone providers cooperate with the countries where the calls originate from (block calls, turn over records, etc.)?
I imagine fast-cheap-discreet-and-out-of-control sat phone service (not to mention fast-cheap-discreet-and-out-of-control sat internet service) would be a headache to many of the world's republics. Is such a service physically feasible, like "millions of simultaneous users" feasible?
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
If you are not in a rural environment, you're probably going to be able to get cell phone coverage. If you are in the middle of nowhere, won't a ham radio provide almost the same features, but for free (no per-month cost, though the start up cost might be slightly higher due to license fees)? I know that at least in the mountains in Utah, you can almost always find a repeater tower, and a decent antenna can let you do some fun tricks with the ionosphere. If the only reason you need a satphone is to call normal phones from the middle of nowhere, no wonder you're not finding much of a market.
I have some friends who have rent sat-phones to go hiking in remote areas. It's amazing for peace of mind. They actually used it last year after being cut-off from the road by a storm. They were able to use the phone to notify relatives that they'd be late a couple days.
But the # of people who need this is relatively small compared to the immense cost of satellites. Of course, the biggest users of sat phones aren't the occasional hikers. I think it's the government and resource extraction sectors, e.g. mining firms.
I wonder, could someone launch a SMS only satellite service based on only a few geo-sync satellites rather than the 66 (!) that Iridium launched? With texting only, the extra lag and a few dropped packets don't matter (as long as it re-sends them later).
It goes like: "These phones work everywhere" or "These phones work where there's no other signal"
Let that second one sink in for a moment, by itself it's almost breathtakingly salespeakish.
Then the truth:
"not only do you have to be outside, but you have to have a clear line of sight to the sky and not be near obstructions like buildings
So they DON'T work EVERYHERE. I'll not bother to ask them to work underwater. Just working where my cell phone does not would be cool, but that won't be in my living room.
What they do they do well. But they are so often oversold, and can't do what people expect them to.
Standing in the rain to make a call isn't as attractive as it sounds, if you were told you could be inside.
Then there's the rates.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
That's why they're changing their business model. The new Iridium satellites ($2.1 billion, next-gen constellation), for instance, will give half of the payload space to their satcom application, and the other part will be for sale to anybody that needs a satellite platform but cannot / doesn't want to use a dedicated one.
It costs billions of dollars to create a satellite constellation.
It costs hundreds of millions per year to maintain a satellite constellation.
Most people are far better served by cellular.
The phones themselves are bulky, and the power output necessary would induce (more) RF-hysteria in (more) idiots.
There is a vapor-trail of bankrupt sat-phone companies which have taught the lesson to potential investors.
In other words, the cost people are willing to pay is far less than what it costs to provide the service, SO YOU CAN'T HAVE ANY. Come back when you and a bunch of other people are willing to pay what it actually costs. Until then, don't ask the rest of us to subsidize you, and don't blame investors for not being foolish enough to be the next billion-dollar satellite phone bankruptcy case. It's not the duty of any cell-phone user or telco to pay for Joe NatureShowHost's phone in Outer Mongolia.
Shit ain't free, yo.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
which costs the same as a sat phone, but with no ongoing call costs, will probably do better than a sat phone anyway - especially with the latest digital technologies. Even some of the less recent digital modes eg psk31 are probably better than sat phones in physical conditions that block sat phones, such as under forest cover. Unfortunately there are no (to my knowledge anyway) cheap/free digital voice modes available for HF radio and mere mortals yet.
This of it this way. How many cell phone users are there. Well lets see. A billion+? Those people have terrestrial cell phone networks, and it works fine.
Now even if there are 100,000 people all over the world who need a Sat phone, its still 10,000 times less than cell phone users.
So this is where economy of scale comes in.
You can invest 1 billion dollars in cell phone network upgradation, and still make money, but 100 million spent in satellite phone tech and satellites will need prohibitingly expensive plans and pricing to just get it to work.
Coupled with the fact that many remote regions of the world now get cellular coverage(eg MT. Everest), the number of people who need a sat phone will go down from probably 100,000 to 20,000, pushing up costs even further. I recokon, after around 5 years, maybe 1000-2000 people will need sat phone coverage.
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- several dozen points, post should have been in the form of :
First Post from a satellite pho#%#(^^NO CONNECTION
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I don't know if anybody's still using it, but back in the 80s there was a technology called "meteor burst", which let you do low-speed comms by bouncing off the ionosphere trails left by micrometeorites. Typical applications were collecting snowfall data, where you needed to run on very low power because solar panels often got covered with snow and you mainly wanted results from inaccessible places in bad weather. If I remember correctly, the systems averaged about 300 ps, transmitting at 4800 baud when the reflections were open, and could go about 50 miles.
The military liked it because it worked ok even if there was nuclear explosion between the transmitter and receiver, which normally leaves enough noise to disrupt everything.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The traditional utility model is not being used. The companies are not operating like a traditional utility and they want to recoup the investment to fast. But if they deployed a multi-billion dollar earth spanning network and then had a service plan that was competitive to terrestial cell-tower based service, or partnered with a terrestrial provider (to lessen satellite loads) then they could offer subsidized phones at competive rates for longer term contract commitments, especially if they open the phone manufacture up competitively as well.
... well we know what happened to most of them!
Given a choice between an iPhone 4 on AT&T and having to jailbreak and unlock it to use it in Europe and beyond, versus a phone I don't have to change SIMs on, on the plane before landing like now, I'd likely op for a satellite based phone. (hopefully iPhone or iPhone-esque but really hooked now) It comes down to price. If for example AT&T joined forces (T-Mobile is even better because of world-spanning presence) and a bunch more joint operating agreements with other terrestrial cell providers with a forward thinking satellite service provider; then priced service to compete with only a small premium; I'd be on a sat phone now. Right now. And so would millions of other people. And if you make the average satellite lifetime into a decade plus preferably 20 years plus, then you can price it competitively and generate a good revenue stream.
But it is a Utility sized one. It depends on a few dollars profit over operating costs from each user each month, not several hundred dollars each month in profit from each user. And the key to lowering per user operating cost is volume. Act like a utility that they are and maybe they can survive. Act like a Internet era get rich quick company
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
There have been satellite/GSM hybrids in the past, which let you pay conventional cellphone prices with terrestrial latency when service was available, and use the satellite when you couldn't get GSM or when you were somewhere that roaming was even more expensive than satphone minutes.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I can see ONE advantage over cellular. It's a neat way to address the COPPER theft problem in the third-world.
Unfortunately for the satellite phone business, people like you are common enough that there ought to be a market, but not common enough to get the economies of scale to make service cheap, though like the fiber telecomm cable business in the 90s/00s, it's a lot cheaper if you can buy bankrupt companies at pennies on the dollar than building from scratch.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Even excluding bandwidth caps, any satellite internet service will always suck due to latency. Latency on Iridium is around 1800ms, Hughesnet is around 800ms.
At least one of the proposed LEO satellite networks ran into real problems because lots of governments insisted that they route satphone traffic from that network's customers in their countries through earth stations in their countries. It was partly security paranoia (like the recent Blackberry regulations around the world), but largely protectionism for the monopoly telcos, which didn't want to lose revenues from people who could use satphones to save money. (Typically this was third-world countries with poor infrastructure and government-run telcos, which were one of the big markets for satphones.) Remember when calling India cost a dollar a minute?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I can barely justify the expense of having a cellphone -- and the only reason that makes the cut is because I have to be available 24/7 in case our servers go down. If that requirement went away, I'd just junk my cellphone with a smile. Every other communications need I have is filled by the Internet. I can voice or voice+video call my stepmother in Greece, I get short text messages via Adium, news over my Roku and browser... I can send SMS to most people by sending an email to phonenumber@carrier.com -- and can't Skype (or something) get into the telephone network too if you want it to? Yeah, cellphone... it just has that one remaining hook in me. Very annoying.
Satellite services are expensive because spacecraft are expensive. Without massive government subsidy (like GPS... which has extensive military utility), that kind of thing will never be more than a luxury. At the current price, my reaction to seeing one is just amusement on every level.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Sat phones are trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist
The problem they are solving is providing voice and data access to places where other networks don't reach.
I'm a university researcher. We want to get data and voice back from researchers in the field who are not IT experts and don't have the budget or the time to set up wireless networks from where they are doing fieldwork. "Switch this on, check a couple of settings, plug your laptop in and you can text chat to us and send us your data" or "phone us if you get stuck with the equipment" is where we want to be with them. Recent situations: oceanographic surveying in Antarctic oceans, geological surveys on a volcano in Nicaragua. Also, proof of concept for geological research on the seashores on the North East coast of England, under some rather high cliffs (nearest line of sight wireless would probably be err, Denmark or Norway maybe?).
As you yourself say, "Most folks" are ok with terrestrial cellular service. But the interesting research sometimes happen where there aren't many people so commercial providers will never connect.
If you are in an area remote enough to need a sat phone, chances are whoever you can get hold of with one isn't going to be able to help you.
I had friends in grad school that did research in remote parts of China and other areas in Central Asia. The first couple of seasons each one would always rent a sat phone "for safety". Then they realized that anyone they got hold of on the phone would need to make the same week-long journey by truck from the nearest medical facility that they had made, which would probably not be helpful in an emergency. It was kind of cool being able to send them free text messages, though (don't remember what company it was, but it had a web-based portal so people could send text messages to the handsets as capacity and connection allowed).
That, and working in China in particular the authorities were often not over-pleased with their work anyway; something like a satellite phone that allowed you to pass information out of western China without going through government-controlled channels was not looked on in a good light, particularly when said person also has tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of GPS and LiDAR equipment with them. It does kind of shout SPY! even if they had been collaborating with Chinese researchers on geologic work for years beforehand and had secured all the proper permits (funny how permit requirements can change at a moment's notice in China, even while working with locals of good standing; one friend had to abandon some very expensive borrowed equipment after being detained by the local/provincial government and being informed by the US consulate upon his release that they advised him to leave as quickly as possible as they expected the national government to be putting out an arrest order for him; he literally took the first flight out of China departing from the city he was in, which took him I think to Kazakhstan; he was later informed he was no longer welcome to visit China, and basically had to start his PhD research over three years in using a new site. They did eventually give the equipment back, which we think was probably the whole point of the exercise - they just wanted to take a look at this cool new toy; the local government had basically been demanding a kickback for bringing it into the country, then released him when it was clear he wasn't in a position to pay anything; it is likely that the PLA gained some fancy new mapping hardware from the whole deal).
Or any apocalypse for that matter.
What better way to prevent communications from being disabled.
Better make sure the instructions for managing those satellites is readily available to the survivors.
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
This has to be one of the stupidest posts in recent /. history. The writer poses an obvious question of why can't "they" make satellite phones work and then proceeds to explain it to us, i.e. no ordinary consumer will purchase a highly-priced handset (priced to recoup some of those massive sunk satellite costs) that can phone hom from the Sahara when the average GSM/UMTS mobile phone will do just fine. It's one of the worst business cases of recent times...
With the automatic ability to switch from wifi/3G/Sat if available lower the barrier in price and availability and up phone features and reserve Satellite for when its needed
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
When I got my first bag phone, I didn't "need" a cell phone. It just allowed me to make what was then "long distance" phone call without being charged extra. Nights and weekends for free.
the company I work for has a couple pool sat phones. we legitimately go places cell phones dont go. Its nice being able to call home. while its annoying going outside to get rained on to make a phone call, its more annoying having that second delay. Data isn't a problem. One thing I think would help out is if Iridium would team up with Orange, O2, AT&T or someone and develop an add on for your phone to connect to the satelites. The Iridium phone just doesn't have the wow factor, however, if I could tether my BB to it. that would be nice, .
There is remarkably poor phone service in the middle of the ocean, or in countries with poor infrastructure. Think Katrina or some other natural catastrophe where a cell phone site could be remotely connected through a satellite using a simple flat antenna.
Consider 77 satellites, each catching [100 watts] of solar power that you perfectly turn into useful, information carrying RF, and then perfectly overlay so that the entire surface of the earth is covered. That sets available flux at ground level, You can't use more gain and not lose coverage area (location independent access). Now add users with omni-directional antennas. User antennas must not only be small but generally omni-directional - they have to see all the sky and can't be high gain beams constantly pointed (too big, too expensive). The associated antenna aperture determines captured power. Because of system noise temperature (antenna sees terra firma no matter what NF the equipment has, S/N ratio is determined, thus due Shannon capacity of link is set. Guess what, it's not much to write home about if you plug in reasonable numbers. A few users on each satellite can get a little bit but all users can't use it all (or much) of the time. And we haven't even talked about backhaul, real-world efficiences etc. This problem is akin to the problem of getting 3G or 4G mobile networks to work everywhere. They don't and won't unless the paths are shortened greatly and the density of points-of-presence (cell sites) is greatly increased. n6gn
Ever try to buy an iPhone or Android phone off-contract?
reminds me of: the only way to win is not to play.
Part of the answer is debt.
The fact that there are some that make money by charging interest is the fundamental problem of Capitalism, in my view; the reason why it can't work in the long term. This is not a new and revolutionary insight - even the early Christians recognised "usury" (orig. charging interest on loans) as one of the major sins - which, incidentally, is why Jews ended up being regarded as greedy money lenders: Jews were excluded from most other careers, but had no religious qualms about money lending.
Interest payment introduces an unproductive overhead on the economy (ie somebody is making a profit without delivering a tangible product), which in my view lies at the bottom of the constant need for economic growth. The solution, I suppose, could be to stop paying your debt, simply. Go bankrupt, let somebody else buy the company at a heavy discount; repeat a few times and it may end up being a wothwhile business.
Or society could simply decide that rent-taking is no longer allowed. Yes, yes, I know: heresy.