ELECTRONICS
S-band amplifiers meant the satellites could no longer
relay signals downward to handset customers, turning
Globalstar’s 48-satellite network into a simplex system,
rather than a duplex system.
Dealt lemons, Globalstar made lemonade by
introducing the highly successful SPOT personal
messenger system, which works using the satellites’ still-functioning L-band uplink, used by simplex systems.
As you read this, Iridium is fighting to keep its
dominance in the U.S. satellite handset market, achieved
thanks to strong sales for its latest model, the Iridium
9555 handset. Inmarsat, a longtime player in the
marine satcom market, has begun offering a lower-cost
handset, with less expensive service plans. A new
player has announced a hybrid cellular/satellite phone
that fits in your pocket, and Globalstar itself is coming
back from the dead. It’s hard to imagine how this
competition could not benefit cruisers who want to
stay connected offshore and in foreign waters.
INMARSAT IN THE GAME
Inmarsat is the leading provider of mobile satellite
services to the maritime industry, with more than 268,000
subscribers served by 11 geostationary orbit (GEO)
satellites. Unlike LEO satellites, GEO satellites match the
rotation of the Earth and orbit thousands of miles higher
than their LEO counterparts. Sitting about 22,000 miles
above the equator, an Inmarsat GEO satellite has a
footprint covering about a third of the planet. Last
summer, Inmarsat unveiled its IsatPhone Pro satellite
telephone, its first handset for the worldwide market.
The IsatPhone has Bluetooth capabilities for hands-free
use, as well as voicemail, texting, and email messaging. Its
own GPS makes position info available for incorporating
into a text message, and, in fact, GPS is used to determine
which of three Inmarsat GEO satellites the phone
connects to. The phone can use a SIM card for conversion
to a GSM-based cell phone albeit a bulky one—even
when made smaller by removal of its satellite aerial.
Like the Iridium 9555 handset, the IsatPhone Pro is
designed for light data transmissions such as sending
text-based emails from a PC; as of this writing, the
company had not enabled that feature in its system, but
it may do so sometime this year. Like the Iridium 9555, a
data-enabled IsatPhone could sustain a 2400bps data rate,
which corresponds to about 1 megabyte (MB) an hour.
One of the principal reasons cruisers use satellite
telephones is for obtaining weather forecast texts and
graphical weather predictions in downloaded GRIB
files—that is, charts overlaid with wave heights and
directions, wind speeds, and other information essential to
passagemakers. So when an Inmarsat exec asked me how
important the data feature is on a satellite phone, since it
would be so slow, my first response was, “Very!” Then,
“Slow data is better than no data.”
When Inmarsat comes online with its data service, it
will no doubt offer services for filtering and compressing
emails and downloading attachments through “crash
and recovery” features. That means when a data call is
dropped, the subscriber is prompted to make another
call, which continues the download where he or she left
off, rather than having to start over.
Here’s the kicker: the IsatPhone Pro costs only $599
for the hardware, $200 a year for service, and about $1 a
minute for airtime. The Iridium 9555 retails for $1,250 and
costs $488 a year for service and $1.49 a minute. These
are just basic costs, obtained from Global Satellite USA of
Ft. Lauderdale, which does a lot of marine business selling
both Iridium and Inmarsat products and services. All
satellite phones and service plans are sold through
dealers, so the pricing can vary. It can be a lot like
choosing a mobile phone plan—in fact, too much so.
WAR OF WORDS
Money may not be the most important thing in life, but
it’s not number three either, especially if you’ve just sold
your house so you can retire aboard a trawler. Faced
with a major price disadvantage, Iridium attacked
Inmarsat with its weapon of choice: a “white paper.” It
commissioned the international consulting firm of Frost
& Sullivan to conduct a side-by-side test of the Inmarsat
IsatPhone Pro and the Iridium 9555 handsets. Predictably,
perhaps, Frost & Sullivan found the 9555 “superior to the
Inmarsat phone in most measurable areas”—including
consistently good performance in all test locations, faster
network acquisition, faster call connection, and better
call quality and network performance. It also noted the
IsatPhone’s current inability to serve as a PC modem.
Biased? Possibly, but Frost & Sullivan has a weird
kind of credibility as everybody’s mercenary. It’s quite
funny, really.
In 2002, when Globalstar was the satellite communi-
cations handset for many vessels in the Alaska fishing
fleet and recreational vessels traveling down island,
Globalstar commissioned Frost & Sullivan to produce
a white paper comparing Globalstar’s old GST-1600
handset to Iridium’s model at the time. Quoting from
that document:
“The most glaring distinction between the Iridium
and Globalstar satellite phones noted by the more than
10 individuals testing the equipment was that of audio
quality during voice calls. It was universally observed
