Iridium Go is 2.4 Kbits/s compared with 350 Mbps here, and data is charged in minutes (i.e. the slower/worse the connection the more it costs). Apples and oranges.
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.
Iridium Go is designed to hit a price point. Whats the cheapest way to get data out in the middle of the Atlantic and is basically plug and play. It has leapfrogged SSB packet radio as the preferred, low cost data service.
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.
> Also data is not charged in minutes, it's theoretically unlimited.
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'
Maybe, though there are 43830 minutes in a month and that package offers 150-mins. Guessing there better bulk min plans, but at the 0.42 a min over the 150-mins, that’s $18345.60 + the monthly fee.
Any given ship in the shipping industry probably burns that in fuel per day. Or half day. I think the value proposition is in line. I'll admit it seems expensive from the perspective of our dream sail around the world whilst coding and collecting benjamins from various hustles.
Thanks for the clarification; I didn’t want to overspeak. Next question though, how do they onboard 42x that much fuel for a 6 week transpacific journey?
globalstar is a bad joke and not a viable option for maritime services (or over-ocean aviation services) because unlike iridium or inmarsat, its satellite terminal-to-earth-station architecture is a bent pipe.
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.
An Iridium embedded modem is one of the things we came across in the wreckage of a small plane we were recovering the pilot's remains from[0].
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.
there's iridium SBD modems for low data rate/non-realtime comms (like position trackers) and full featured iridium voice/data modems integrated into a vast array of products now, in the land mobile, aviation and maritime segments.
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.
The Garmin inReach[0] line of satellite communicators are another example of a 3rd party Iridium partnership. Given the size/form factor, I wonder if they're using more custom hardware than just an off-the-shelf module for their integration.
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.)
Is Iridium really competitive for business jets? The bandwidth of even their next-generation satellites does not seem competitive with the GEOs, and I'd guess bizjets should be mostly fine with their latitude limitations.
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.
a small to medium sized business jet can easily mount an iridium terminal on top of it, where even the smallest/least capable geostationary vsat cannot.
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)
I'm planning on moving onto a sailing boat this year, I'd be very interested if it was something an mere mortal could afford but at that price I'm sticking to 5G mobile broadband. Marine Starlink would have given me a broader range of places I can stay (especially remote areas) but the cost is far too high.
Commercial and military vessels have contracts with Iridium/Inmarsat etc for mission critical stuff.
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.
I used to be a naval officer in the Dutch navy, this is the type of capability that we would love to have. It was always a mess to divide satcom bandwidth between operational and recreational purposes, so if we could put all non-essential traffic on Starlink (for only 5k/month/ship too!) that would be a huge win and free up massive operational bandwidth on the more serious satcoms.
Would there be any concern that you are essentially advertising your location at all times to some third party corp? Or is that only a concern during certain times and you can just turn off the commercial system at that point?
By the time NATO partners can no longer trust each other with the position of their naval vessels you have serious problem already. The official satcoms are all NATO-shared satellites anyway, so you could probably derive their positions from that.
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.
>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.
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.
Another commenter here mentioned that Starlink user terminals include a GPS receiver, and report their coordinates back to Starlink. That'd create an alternate vector for locating maritime users – exfiltrate that position information from their servers.
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...
All the existing commercial maritime comms providers will happily sell separate bandwidth for crew use, or let them meter/throttle it, so I assume the challenges the Dutch navy has with their existing setup are related to specific security and/or procurement restrictions preventing them from just installing the same solutions commercial vessels use. Probably less about broadcasting location and more about what is and isn't allowed on their vessels
All surface maritime vessels, military or not, need to advertise their location to anyone who can listen for the purpose of collision avoidance. If they didn't that would probably violate a treaty.
Military vessels are exempt from that particular treaty. That would not be a significant worry. But yes, when you go into serious operations, the ship typically enters "black hole" operations where all non-essential communications are blocked. In the ships we were at they just pulled the network cable for the non-operational comms, very effective at preventing anyone from emailing back home.
Neither iridium nor Inmarsat provides capabilities of starlink: low latency, high bandwidth, asat-resistant, jamming-resistant infrastructure, all this proven in a real world conflict. They are ‘only’ missing coverage. Military will pay top dollar for this, Musk is in the name-his-price territory here. It’s become mission critical overnight. If they manage to cover the full globe, you’ll see the DoD quietly spending billions to have access and more billions to deny any other military the option.
These vessels still have people on board who want to watch YouTube.
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.
> 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.
I feel like cruise ships will use this a lot. They're one of the last things on the planet that don't have cell service or internet that isn't 25$ a minute.
Or vessels working offshore industry… having that kind of uplink speed could really change how the industries work. More ‘over the horizon’ control for equipment, immediate upload of huge point cloud files from as built surveys, constant video comunication with onshore engineers and project managers…
I thought they went bankrupt and had to deorbit all the satellites so I googled them. They have 1.7M subscribers. Seems they are doing something right.
They did go bankrupt, and Motorola (their original main funder) lost billions on the initial investment [0]. But shed of debt and reborn with new investors, they are now profitable [1]. They have now deorbited the first generation satellites, but since 2017 they have launched the Iridium NEXT constellation and that is what is functioning now [2].
Well, there hasn't been a lot of competition in their space traditionally. Many of those subscribers (I've been one) use it because they need it and there is no better option, but don't exactly enjoy it...
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.