SatComms: Iridium cuts pricing
Iridium - the low orbit satcomms provider, has cut its prices - and now it's often cheaper to have a satellite phone than a GSM phone if you travel a lot.
Iridium(R) Satellite has announced a new North American pricing plan that offers extremely low rates for satellite phone calls.
Users can now have pre-paid air time packages with street prices in the USD0.30-40 per minute range. But it's for bigger users that the real savings come - the company is offering larger "super discount" packages that drive prices down to below USD0.15 per minute.
In April, Iridium said it is "the only mobile satellite system offering high-volume discount plans covering all of North America, including the extreme northern regions of Canada and Alaska, and the entire Caribbean, with no roaming charges."
It's the roaming charges that make the big difference: for travellers in and around the US, roaming charges make huge differences to their calls. And, of course, normal GSM phones are unusable in large parts of the USA where there are thin populations.
So the Iridium pricing will prove valuable to many.
Iridium also claims higher connectivity and reliability than many GSM and analogue networks - "Year to year, Iridium's robust satellite network has consistently maintained an unmatched record of reliability. Our connection rate for satellite calls is near perfect," says the company. But it's not their own figures: a survey by Frost and Sullivan found "calls through the Iridium system are nearly three times more likely to be successfully connected and completed than a competitive network."
The company aims its products at industries operating in remote and highly mobile environments such as maritime, aviation, government/military, emergency/humanitarian services, mining, forestry, oil and gas, heavy equipment, transportation and utilities.
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