Have you ever traveled out of custom GSM coverage? While traditional cell phones have become an essential tool in everyday life and work for most people, and cell phone coverage is very good in most urban areas of the world, it is still not possible to use a normal cell phone in large areas even of quite civilized countries.

There are few choices of a good voice communication system when GSM fails. One of the most important alternatives are satellite phones. At the moment their are three major companies that offer satellite phone service. Iridium is the only fully global satellite phone service provider. It currently has 66 active satellite in use that ensure global coverage. Iridium phones are supplied by Motorola (the latest phones being the Iridium 9505a and Iridium 9555). While Iridium voice services are of decent quality, the data connections made through the Iridium network are of low speed.

Globalstar was traditionally Iridium’s main rival, though it doesn’t have a full global coverage (it doesn’t cover most of the world’s ocean areas). Since 2007 Globalstar has been having serious problems with its satellite network and cannot guarantee proper voice connections.

Inmarsat is best known for providing services  for marine purposes.

Thuraya is a slightly newer satellite phone service provider than the previous three. It currently has three geo-synchronous satellites that cover Europe, most of Asia, Australia and Northern Africa. See a full Thuraya coverage map for more details.

When choosing a satellite phone, the most important criteria is area of usage. Since the satellite phone providers have different coverage areas, this is the first thing that must be considered. If you are looking to buy or rent a satphone, you then should consider the purposes you need the phone for and then compare the costs of the services that are available.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 1:53 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.