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.

Re:Pricing?

Phone : $895-1495
Activation: $50
Monthly just-because fee: $19.99 to $289 (0 - 250 minutes included)
Per-minute .99 to .49 (Promotional limited fee)
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 [rentexpress.com]

I hope it's better now.

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.

Re:Pricing?

Ah, but the current incarnation of Iridium wrote off the development and construction costs, so they need only charge for the operations costs plus profit. I am guessing still not inexpensive, but it doesn't have to be the $5/minute of the earlier attempt.

sPh

Data rate is only 2400 bps

Read the Iridium service details carefully. The 'data service' (data calls to anywhere, presumably converted to standard modem protocols at the PSTN gateway) 'offers a data rate of up to 2.4 Kbps', which is the figure I recall from previously reading about Iridium.

The 'Internet data service' (which appears to mean using Iridium as your ISP) 'utilizes transparent compression, resulting in a data rate of up to 10 Kbps, depending on content' (my emphasis). So no, Iridium didn't suddenly get faster or start supporting channel bonding. I suspect that the standard data service probably includes such compression too, but the marketing department just forgot to include this misleading statement in its description. This does not turn a 2400 bps connection through Iridium into a 10 kbps connection any more than MNP5 (included in any ordinary modem) turns your 50 kbps connection through the PSTN into a 200 kbps connection.

Nice, but hardly new

This is by far not the first commercial satellite data access, by any criteria.

It may wind up being less expensive (as the initial costs were all lost), but you can do 9600 on a Globalstar (they're talking about a 30k+, not sure if thats working now or later) and 64k/channel on InMarsat (has been working for years).

InMarsat can mux together multiple 64k channels to give 128k+ IP access from anywhere on earth. it's not the cheapest way to check your email (at $30+ per minute for a 128k connection) but for remote field work there's not a lot of alternatives.

We haven't used any Iridium services, but if the Globalstar phones are any indication (and they should be, as its a pretty similar system) the biggest difficulty is keeping the antenna on a satellite. You can lose a connection very easily, and with data just getting extra noise or interference is a lot more of a pain than having the audio from a call drop out for a half-second.

Once you add dishes to the equation (to get around losing calls from moving the phone) you're basically back to using a larger (but still portable) InMarSat system. If they can come up with a decent dish setup that runs off of batteries for more than 20 minutes of connect time, Iridium would have something novel to offer.

As it stands, the only thing Iridium is bringing to the table is the potential for lower costs through competition (I'm not complaining -- that's plenty for me!)

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Pricing?

According to this [iridium.com] 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

You already can!

I would happily pay $300 / month even for 9.6kbps

With AOL's well known idea of speed and thier new pricing plan, you can!

--

This is great for field scientists and engineers

Imagine being an archaeologist, geologist, paleontologist or land surveyor. Now you can instantly file field reports with your colleagues at home or even archive them into one's own home or office database for safekeeping and later retrieval. It think this will be invaluable to many. The revolution continues.

Very old news

Iridium has had/promised this data service for years. Isn't this beating a dead horse?

I researched this 9600 bps option for Cambodian community infrastructure.. but even with two of the Iridium investors being close to the leader of this project we still didn't buy into it.

They've been saying the same thing about how this fills a need for a long time, but other companies have also provided satellite data services for a long time.

You need a purchase case for a mobile phone or terminal. Doesn't compute unless maybe you're in the military.. or they have dropped prices from orbit.

$300 for 9600kbps?

Geezus, Timothy, I think Taco may be paying you too much.


Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.

No, the Iridium sats are in LEO

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.

Pirate Communication

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.