- $302 for the hardware
- $17/month for a “line fee”
- $0.20/message (50 characters)
Would be nice if there was an actually affordable, programmable Iridium device.
When I had a sat phone (needed to travel sometimes to questionable places for work) I used Thuraya which is much cheaper for airtime. 40€ gets you a whole year's worth of inbound service (airtime) and about 15 mins of call credit for outbound. With iridium that gets you about one month.
But Thuraya only had 2 active sats. One geostationary over the middle east and one over the far east. No service over the Americas. The Asian one failed early this year and the coverage for the region which can't be met by the other one is now inoperable.
The middle east sat is actually beyond its planned service life and if it goes down there's no immediate backup. Though a replacement is ready for launch according to Wikipedia. You also need visibility of the southern horizon (or northern, if you're in the southern hemisphere). So for hiking in valleys it's not a good bet. The same goes for Inmarsat for that matter. But they do have more sats.
Iridium in contrast is fully worldwide, has a robust constellation of many low earth orbit sats that move across the sky so you don't need to see a fixed point. It's more robust for emergencies. But the price is much higher. It's a trade-off. You get what you pay for.
As I no longer travel for work but do hike, I ditched the Thuraya and got a Garmin InReach which runs on iridium. But that costs more than Thuraya even though it can only send messages. Though with their latest cost increase I might just drop it and find something cheaper. Maybe Starlink direct to cell.
Cynically I assume this is because it would be no different than their expensive service in practice, and cannibalize their premium offerings.
Recently had two calls with an Iridium phone, one sent and one received, about 1 minute each. T-Mobile charged me $50 for those.
I found it very odd - it seemed like Iridium was somehow passing the call fees onto me, but I can't be sure because the T-Mobile rep I chatted with was unable to comprehend the situation (I suspect I was talking to an LLM, but it ultimately gave me a $30 rebate at least).
That usually makes Iridium -> terrestrial calls much more economical than the other way around, as telcos usually use the opportunity of terrestrial -> satcom calls to add on ridiculous margins. Conversely, satellite -> terrestrial calling is usually around a dollar per minute or less, these days.
In your situation, that would come out to a $50 (or maybe $25) charge per minute. Hefty, but that indeed seems to be at least in the ballpark of their listed rates (for prepaid here, for example: https://prepaid.t-mobile.com/connect/international-calling-r...).
It seems like cell carriers always charge more per minute for satellite calls than any satellite provider does, so I’m guessing they just set their rates conservatively to always make a profit on their end. And the demand for satellite calls seems like it would be pretty inelastic.
It isn't too documented, or let me say it isn't documented at all but you can write AT commands and start raw TCP connections and read and write to that socket.
And it is actually reasonably priced. I tried to open SSH connections and it was barely usable. You get a very small number of bits per second.
Edit: Found the private repo I had created back then in case anyone has any interest. It looks like I did something like this:
func (sess *IridiumGoSession) ActivateDataWithCustomSettings() (*PerformTaskResponse, error) {
return sess.PerformTask("2",
MakeOption("set state", "true", "bool"),
MakeOption("Firewall allow all traffic", "false", "bool"),
MakeOption("Firewall exceptions", "XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX-all-tcp", "bool"),
MakeOption("Enable DNS forwarding", "false", "bool"),
MakeOption("Dial number", "0088160000330", "bool"),
)
}
Edit: I think $250 for 50GB of truly global data. I can’t do the math right now, but it seems like a better deal at face value.
Price wise, it's no comparison, but the two don't directly compete yet – power usage and antenna size of Iridium and Starlink are orders of magnitude apart (largely due to the L-band spectrum available to Iridium globally).
They don't have sat-to-sat communications deployed yet, so they can work only near the ground stations.
I remember reading about this a while back, but doesn’t SpaceX offer some kind of IoT modem for a low cost (not the Starlink dishes)
It is still a heavy work in progress, but if anybody here is suffering from expensive Iridium bills, I would love to connect and discuss to make sure JSON BinPack is built the right way!
After spending a few minutes poking around your landing page, I'm not sure how JSON BinPack works. I see a JSON Schema, a JSON document and then a payload, but I'd be interested in the low level details of how I get from a schema to a payload. When I'm on a microcontroller, I'm going to care quite a bit about the code that has to run to make that, and also the code that's receiving it. Is this something I could hand-jam on the micro, and then decode with a nice schema on the receiving side? Understanding the path from code and data to serialized payload would be important to me.
One thing that was nice about using ProtocolBuffers for this was that I had libraries at hand to encode/decode messages in several different languages (which were used) - what is the roadmap or current language support?
I can understand how ProtocolBuffers handles schema evolution, but I'm still not sure how JSON Schema evolution would work with JSON BinPack. An example would move mountains.
Finally, if I were digging into this and found it had switched from Apache to AGPL, and required a commercial license, it would be a hard sell vs all the permissively licensed alternatives. At the end of the day, Iridium SBD messages are like 270 bytes and even hand rolling a binary format is pretty manageable. I think I could swing budget for support, consulting, maintenance or some other service. But if I were evaluating this back when I needed a serialization format, and ran into AGPL, I would bounce almost immediately.
It's crazy to me that $11,250/month could be considered low for a comfy job like engineering manager, especially if the work is interesting. The cost of living in Phoenix must be through the roof?
When I was an intern 15 years ago I worked on a software library for this https://www.embeddedts.com/products/TS-IRIDIUM Board that does a similar thing (though you would need to stack on a cellular board if you wanted cell modems).
We used them to help Arizona Department of Transportation collect traffic data in remote locations.
We had big plans at that company to make a much smaller, much cheaper 9602 transceiver replacement, but the company got bought out before that could launch.
The costs for satellite SBD messages is definitely eye-watering though. Our device transmits position data every 2 minutes while relying on satellite connections, which we definitely notice the costs of during development. We'd like to look at other providers, but for various reasons (excluding costs) they end up being less ideal than Iridium.
HF propagation does vary over time, but you could send a signal far more often to make up for it.
I'm not even sure if Skylo is live with Inmarsat at this point, or if there are any other NTN providers covering oceans.
Anyone know how he got this opportunity? I'd love to join something like this if all I had to do was make a cool Iridium transmitter!