Comment: Satellite Phone

G'day Mark,
my satellite hire phones use the pivotel iridium service (same iridium satellites as telstra uses) but their call charges are much cheaper than most other sat. services & pivotel you only pay one direction. see call charges here, my hire phones are on the $35 plan, http://www.pivotel.com.au/iridium_plans.html
it pays to shop around. hoo roo

Mark Hi,
Telstra have the higher call rate to non Telstra sat phones the same as they do for mobiles. I have the Isat pro sat phone that also attracts the $19.95 PM rate.
To over come this my family/friends email my sat phone at nil cost to them or me, then I call them back at my convenience which costs me approx 80 cents per minute or part of. I know that is not going to suit most but works for me.

Mike.

Is there any advantage to the sat phone over Spot Connect? Seems to me the sat phone is more expensive and does not have emergency functions. Of course you can talk but at a cost....

Funny you should say that.... when ever there has been a thread about satellite phones I have always made mention of the high cost of phone a satellite phone and it always feel on deaf ears.

It seems it is more important to most the cost of the outgoing call from the satellite phone that in whole is not much difference from one provider to another.

This was the main reason we went with the Pivotel's Iridium service....... calls to our satellite phone are the same as calling a standard mobile phone...... out going calls from our satellite phone are about 90 cents per minute.

Maybe some people may sit up and listen.

Maybe people who have friends satellite number might think twice about ringing them.

I have a satellite phone but I struggle with the settings, so I hope someone qualified will comment on this.

Twenty bucks a minute sounds a bit dear. A dollar a minute is more like it.

Mark mentions the international number. I'm think a couple of people have their satellite phones set up for international roaming.

I travel alone on a quadbike in remote areas where nobody will come by in a fourby in the next 12 months, so I phone in my coordinates each evening at 7.00pm.

Last trip I had a few good chats with my wife and when I got home she told me the longest one cost 30 bucks. Well, 30 bucks for a half hour chat with my wife is money well spent in the circumstances, I reckon. But 20 bucks a minute! Nah! Something wrong here, Fellas.

I called the old mans Inmarsat phone from my land line.....$15 per minute. He rings me from his Inmarsat phone.....$2 per minute.
Rang his Inmarsat phone from my mobile.....$2.15 per minute.
Go figure!
Spat the dummy at my land line phone provider, and when I showed them this, they dropped it to $2 per minute and recredited my account.
My very well known land line phone service provider is a crook.
BW.

Mark

You may not like this but ever since satellite phones were on the market it has been widely known that they cost heaps. Personally I would have asked the cost before ringing.

When we got our phone we only gave the number to our closest friends and immediate family. And we also sent them the following brief:

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To call us on our satellite phone:
• If you are inside Australia: Dial 00118707764*****
• If you are outside Australia: Dial 008707764*****

To send us an SMS:
Send the SMS in the same way as you would to any phone. Just remember the cost will be higher than standard mobile to mobile SMS costs.

To send us an Email:
You can send an email to us for free at: 8707764*****@message.inmarsat.com.

Costs:
For YOU to call Us and actually call and speak to us YOU pay HEAPS for the Satellite phone call cost. It can be quite expensive at more than a dollar a minute. But remember we will most likely have the phone on only in the evening after about 7:30.

The cheapest way to get a message to us is to use an email. It's free for you lot but not us.

Note also that we cannot call “000” or any 1800 or 13 numbers from the satellite phone.

See you when we get home. DO NOT GIVE THE NUMBER TO ANYONE OTHER. The emergency mobs can have it whenever they ask or need it. No one else will ned it.


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I would be jumping on them a bit for not letting you know the costs when they told you the number.

I believe that the costs have gone up since I first drafted the above note. So I will have to update the brief. Of course I have deleted some private information and itinerary stuff from the brief and it is not as complete as the real printed one for the rellos.

So far since July 2011 we have made two very brief phone calls and sent about twenty GPS position emails and received about the same number of emails. As I said with our mob it's no news = good news.