Definitely aimed at the champagne caviar, St Barts crowd rather than the hard scrabble, cruiser on a fixed income.
In other terms, Iridium Go is still the best value around and truly global for the time being.
Iridium GO is cheap, but that's all you can really say positively about it. It is arguably not even offering "internet" in the normal sense, since loading a website would be incredibly expensive/bad and is therefore restricted to low data rate messaging and plain text weather updates.
Is $5K/month a niche product? Undeniably yes, and I hope to see more flex offerings later, but this isn't a good comparison.
https://www.inmarsat.com/en/solutions-services/maritime/serv...
Or Globalstar.
https://www.globalstar.com/en-us/blog/articles/satellite-sol...
there is zero globalstar mid ocean coverage.
there is a reason you will see lots of competing options for people integrating the iridium embedded modems into things designed to go on top of $40 million business jets and just about zero globalstar.
It was for his Spidertracks[1] flight tracking system. (Which, with the ADSB track, helped us hone in on the possible location. The wreck ended up being right in line with the last few pings.
[0] https://lompocrecord.com/news/local/experienced-solvang-bush...
one thing iridium has actually done really well is provide the developer documentation to make this fairly straightforward, there's a set of 600 page PDF files with every detail you could possibly need to make a very tiny embedded linux system talk to an iridum modem over a UART.
They're another example of exorbitant fees for tiny bits of data. (Though, being able to text pretty much anywhere on the globe on a tiny device is really nice - even with a 20minute RTT.)
I'd expect most of them to go with one of the Ka band these days; they have pretty small antennas available these days as far as I know.
you can fairly easily integrate iridium into something as small as a cessna 172...
at the minimum iridium will provide the ability to make phone calls to/from the PSTN while in the middle of an ocean on its smallest terminal. go up in terminal size a bit and you get something good for 500kbps of data.
for very large business jets that would be crossing the atlantic or pacific, that's a different market (overlaps somewhat with the same aviation VSAT terminals you would see on a 737-900 MAX)
Also data is not charged in minutes, it's theoretically unlimited. The voice plans are charged in minutes and I don't think worth it.
Just like the RO water-makers in the past, I believe this is the opening salvo in bringing data prices down on the high seas. A few providers have been the only players in this field (Inmarsat and Iridium) and it shows. Prices haven't budged in ages.
If you buy the 'medium plan' for $119/month [1] you get 150 Minutes of 'Data, Standard Voice or combination of both' and can buy additional data for US$0.42/min. And the 'light plan' [2] at $57/month includes just 5 minutes.
Data seems to a "call via the Iridium GO! Access number" like old school dial-up.
It's only if you buy the 'heavy plan' for $149 [3] that you get the 'Unlimited Data'
Or am I misunderstanding things?
[1] https://www.satphone.co.uk/product/iridium-go-post-paid-serv... [2] https://www.satphone.co.uk/product/iridium-go-post-paid-serv... [3] https://www.satphone.co.uk/product/iridium-go-post-paid-serv...
There's no competition up there, GEO sats are too far north to see the Pole.
I'd argue it is inherently very limited – 2.4 kbit/s is really not a lot, even sustained over a whole month ;)
Very Low Sulfer Fuel Oil (VLSFO) is running, depending on where the ship is loading up, 850 to 1150 USD a tonne.(July 7 2022)[1]
In round numbers, say, USD 1,000 a tonne, USD 10,000 an hour, USD 250,000 a day, and for a 20 day trip, USD 5,000,000.
[1] https://shipandbunker.com/prices
[2] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/how-many-gallons-of-fuel-d...
More like: commercial and military vessels
An extra box which based on current coverage map provides GSM level coast-only coverage of unproven reliability doesn't hold much appeal, even factoring in how expensive satellite broadband is.
With regards to SpaceX ratting on our location, I don't think that would be a serious worry but in any case whenever shit gets serious a warship will go into "black hole" operations that block any non-essential comms. I no longer work for the navy but I can imagine that would involve physically cutting power to the starlink dish.
As a practical matter as well, both in theory and based on usage in Ukraine, Starlink appears to be a somewhat challenging target too. A phased array doing 10-12 GHz is a fairly tight beam and it's tracking very fast across the sky, jumping around between LEO@550km (and in the future VLEO@~350km) sats. In a naval setting it's not clear that'd be much of a limiting factor: something capable of seeing that would probably need to be at such an altitude and angle to ships on the ocean that it could also just plain see any surface naval vessel directly optically or via radar. The stealth ship proposals Skunkworks suggested back around the F-117 never went anywhere since the US Navy is dumb^Wtraditional.
But as you say either way they can always just turn it off as needed. It'd be very helpful the much higher percentage of time that things are boring.
I had a hard time finding confirmation of this online (lots of hits about Starlink potentially being used _as_ a GNSS), but one of the photos of this teardown of a terminal highlights the GPS receiver: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/teard...
This will be amazing for retaining crew while sitting at anchor outside of Panama for day 27 of who knows how long.
You can prepare for a 7 day cruise between ports when you're going to be pretty busy anyway. The madness of seeing land and not being able to do anything for weeks on end is hard to describe.
I sat through a Vodafone presentation at a maritime comms conference a couple of years ago and he quoted just how high a percentage of the world's commercial shipping traffic was within range of his LTE networks. The ability to provide high speed internet within sight of [most] land has been around for a while, at lower costs than Starlink. If providers haven't added it to their crew internet provision, it's not because they've been waiting for Elon.
But over a few years, if Starlink delivers on it's ambition, I'd expect a steady stream of converts.
Well that's the least important analysis compared to looking at what should be available in a year.
Probably targeted more are commercial shipping vessels, cruise ships, and even militaries. I imagine that number would make the venture worth it.
350mbit can be sold ands split across 1000pax in on a cruise ship at $5/day so you’d have the fee covered on day 1.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-rise-a...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fall-and-rise-of-iridium-14...
Tankers, cruise ships, etc.