There are a few pieces of gear that we must have in order for our mission to be successful, one of course is the sat phone.
When I started to look into sat phones and satellite internet access I found a company out of the UK, Inmarsat. Their satellite technology is probably the best available for business and consumers but it is extremely costly, specially for an organizations like ours. We looked into Iridium but was very similar to the previous one, perhaps with smaller phones. And the last we looked at was Globalstar which we are likely going to be using the most.
The Inmarsat phone which I have used in the past is well built, you can see it here https://www.inmarsat.com/service-collection/isatphone/ , I am not going to enter the service plans as they vary, but the best sites I found to see the phones and service plans without them popping alert windows to try to sell are these:
https://www.satmodo.com/2019-satellite-phone-buyers-guide/
https://www.bluecosmo.com/devices/satellite-phones
By now if you clicked on any of the 2 links above you also saw the Iridium phones as well as Globalstar’s.
The winner to us is Globalstar as long as we are helping in the USA and some other parts where service is available. Yes that is true, not all satellite phones work everywhere. Globalstar has the smallest network but their call quality is incredible, they also give you a US based phone number which is very important if you are mainly here or people who will call you are mainly from the US. Globalstar’s phone also has the fastest internet access coming from a phone, a whooping 9.6 Kbps but all others are slower. I will cover satellite internet in another post.
I still need to play with the Globalstar phone to give you feedback on it’s construction and capabilities. As soon as I know more I will update here.
But as we will be deploying to where we are needed in the world, we are likely going to have Inmarsat as our backup for use in more remote areas. Also Inmarsat has the best service for internet access which is key to us.
So if you need a satellite phone for North America and a few other parts of the world (see their coverage maps) Globalstar is amazing and affordable. If you need to go more global, Inmarsat is our choice at this time.