BGANs ROCK! It's a total geek mobility device. I was able to take an extended vacation to some very remote parts of Laos while still being able to check in on our servers and IT stuff. (We're a super small company, so I'm the IT guy even while on vacation.)

Any case, the BGAN is really small and also doubles as a satellite phone. I think phone service was like 0.75 or 1.00 per minute which was totally reasonable. Data rate was per MB and they also offer a 32, 64, and 128kbit streaming connection. I didn't use the streaming as it was more expensive than the packet rate data and I didn't have any need, but it's there if you need it.

As there are only a couple of satellites servicing the BGAN, I highly recommend you take a compass with you as you will need to point it in both the right direction and at the right amount of tilt to get a signal. It's fairly sensitive, so the compass helps you get it pointed in the right direction within a couple of degrees. Once you're in the ball park, a rising and falling tone will help you train in on the signal. It takes less than a minute to lock once you initiate a connection. Depending on how far you need to tilt down towards the horizon will determine how much 'clearing' you'll need to be in to get a signal. It works best in places you're least likely to have other sources of internet. When I tested in in Los Angeles prior to leaving, I pretty much had to point it the horizon towards South America. If you're near the equator, you'll more or less be pointing it straight up.

The one 'gotcha' that almost freaked me out is that when you move to different satellite zones, it takes A LONG TIME for it to initially acquire the new satellite the first time. The terminal uses GPS to determine what part of the world it's in and it's not super fast at determining this. I actually thought the damn thing was broken initially before I sat on the beach and RTFM. It was trying to connect to the satellite over South America instead of the one over South East Asia. Expect to take like 20 to 30 minutes if you change zones before you can 'lock' the new satellite. The fewer GPS satellites covering your area, the longer it takes to figure out where it is. Once that's set though, assuming you don't move more than something like 400 miles away from the new location, you don't have to 'reset'; and the connection to the satellite can be acquired quite quickly on subsequent uplinks.

Since I was using it primarily to check email and shell into servers, I was able to keep my Bandwidth charges down. If you start downloading the NY Times home page every time you log in, expect a hefty bandwidth charge when you get back. The BGAN software provides a handy usage gauge, so you'll have nobody but yourself to blame if you start going crazy on the bandwidth.

Overall, highly recommended!!

Not Totally True.

Many customers also use their DNS service, (the EV1 DNS), so while there are 9000 servers physically 'off' there are many more effectively 'black' as the conical names no longer resolve.

I'm one of those customers. We're a very small business as are many of the other customers of The Planet (formerly Everyones Internet -- EV1.net)

I can still access our sever via the IP address, but not via the conical name.

While we host our site on a private server, many of the servers of other customers are resellers and with the DNS service, I could easily see how 10s of thousand of actual sites are down beyond the 9000 physical servers.