What do you do when you live or work in an area where you can’t get reliable cellular or land line phone services? You go with satellite phones of course, just like the guys in 24. I have heard of satellite service before but I always assumed it was hundreds of dollars per month to get that sort of service.

Globalstar USA has a constellation of satellites in orbit to provide voice and data services. The surprise for me came in Globalstar’s pricing, they offer unlimited airtime for $49.99 per month. That is cheaper than my cellular plan. Each year through 2010 the price of the unlimited plan goes down so in 2008 it will cost $39.99, and in 2009- 2010 it will be $19.99.

There are a couple catches to the service, the first is the phone. They are larger than current cellular phones and sport giant antennas that you have seen on TV most likely. The phones themselves will run you from $799 to $999 which isn’t that much more than you will pay for that new N95 from Nokia.
What you don’t get on these phones are the things we are used to seeing on high end cellular handsets. No email support on the phone, no games nothing really other than a connection good most anywhere on the planet where you can see sky and the ability to connect to your laptop for data services. The GSP-1000 satellite phone for example has a data port built-in that connects to any PC USB port allowing data access, which is where the second catch comes in. Don’t expect to get blistering fast data speeds here with an uncompressed data speed of a mere 9.6Kbps it’s more like circa 1992 dial-up that current broadband speeds. That said slow speed is much better than none and it will allow you to check email and more from virtually anywhere you take your notebook.