I'm thinking voice, from multiple smartphones - beats handing around a sat handset to give a damage assessment, it sounds like this can handle multiple concurrent voice communications back to a HQ. For real data connectivity the Red Cross has VSAT communications within ~24 hours, 15 mbps. I'm thinking of a neighborhood or municipal triage where we call in assistance to the most badly hit areas. For this it has promise. Really, satellite comms follows the progression of better and better data upload we saw in the 90s over terrestrial connections, so there's hope for a fat pipe through sats in the future.

I'm definitely waiting to see what the Globalstar Sat-Fi product looks like:

“Today, our throughput is 9600 baud, which is about four times faster than the competition for an MSS product like this,” Rembert said. “With compression, that looks like a 56 kb/s modem back in the day, when you were dialing into AOL.”

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If true, that's a heck of a lot faster than Iridium's product.

Globalstar may be fine for you down south, up here in Alaska not so much. The Globalstar satellite constellation is optimized for the mid-latitudes. Their sat phones for voice comm have developed a very bad reputation up here. Without a totally unobstructed view to the south (such as out on the ocean), they don't work worth sh_t.

Unless and until they improve their coverage of northern areas, Globalstar is not an option for me.

I have had very sporadic success with SPOT beacons, which use the Globalstar network. I have hod near 100% success with the Delorme In Reach, which uses the Iridium network. I have even used them side by side in mountains, forest, and canyons in the continental U.S. I removed the SPOT from my tool kit and went entirely with In Reach. I am not sure how this will work out with the data link, however.

Admittedly, Globalstar was not reliable anywhere when the S-Band amplifiers started crapping out on them in 2007. They had to maneuver good birds to cover the open coverage spots and this created coverage issues. No doubt, they were looking toward losing as few customers as possible and Alaska likely received the short end of the stick. A lot of people left Globalstar and never looked back. I can't say that I blame them. I was more of a business rather than survival user, so I could wait for a good bird to give me 20 minutes of talk time. And the pricing plans could not be beat.

Now, the bad birds have been replaced and the constellation is complete again. I have not experienced any issues since mid-2012. However, I rarely get north of the Canadian border.

Iridium's constellation does have better coverage at the poles, but Globalstar seems to have pretty decent coverage further north with the new birds. It would be interesting to see if anyone has done any tests in 2013 in Alaska. Again, I would not blame anyone for dropping Globalstar during the problem years.

For me, I am not planning on going that far north anytime soon and the Globalstar wi-fi puck seems to be offering speeds several times faster than Iridium. If pricing between the companies remains consistent, the Globalstar product will be about a quarter of the cost.

I'm going to wait and see after both products are out, but I am not going to count Globalstar out because of their unfortunate past.