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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."
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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?
Iridium satellites are at 475 miles, not geo sync
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.
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.
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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 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.
$799,- is just a bit more than a SIM-lock free iPhone costs. So the price is most probably not the problem.
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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.
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).
TerreStar, Sky Terra (Lightsquared), and Inmarsat use geostationary satellites. Iridium and GlobalStar use low earth orbits (below 1000 km ), while ICO Global initially opted for satellites in a medium earth orbit, at about 10,000 km. ICO's latest bird, however, will be geosynchronous.
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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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.
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I sometimes talk to people that use these phones up in Northern Alberta. The quality is actually far better than you would expect, and the delay isn't too noticable. I think the phone the other guy was using was on the Iridium network.
I think that the problem with these phones and why they will never take off is that they will never be cheap enough for mere mortals to use. They just don't have enough bandwidth to have the unwashed masses using it to talk about the latest celeb gossip. With a space based solution, it would be hard to break geographic areas into cells like what is currently done with cell phone tech. The result is that everyone is on the same tower, and there is only so much signal to go around. Because supply is so tight, price has to remain high.
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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.
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Mobile stellite phones have *never* used geosynchronous to the best of my knowledge. The transmission power needed to hit a satellite that far away without a directional antenna is too great, and a directional antenna isn't an option on something the size of a 10-years-ago cell phone.
There are geosync communication satellites and specialized "phones" that relay through them, but those are generally fairly stationary or even "installations" rather than something you can hold in one hand, and walk around freely while using.
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Exactly. I wouldn't say satellite phones are 'failing'. But they are simply a niche market. You use the right tool for the right job, and a satellite phone is a tool intended for use in remote locations. There are better and cheaper technologies (i.e. cellular) for widespread use in more densely populated areas.
Sat phones get extensive use in the remote areas here in Australia. Every farmer has one, and they are generally very reliable and hold a good quality call. The people who benefit from having an 'available everywhere' phone are already using sat phones (farmers in remote areas, very frequent travellers, etc). It's simply that the percentage of people who fit this profile is quite small.
Saying sat phones are failing to achieve more widespread penetration is missing the point - they are simply a square peg in a round hole for most people's telecommunication needs.