Ron, the best answer I can give is to tell you to go back and read a few thousand posts on this thread, especially those by Engineer, Rocket Scientist, and Maurice Winn (not necessarily in that order.) Then I would point you toward GlobalStar's web page: globalstar.com
All the pertinent information is there. And a whole lot more.
My second best answer is this brief synopsis: GlobalStar allows people to make telephone calls (and soon some measure of data) pretty much everywhere. The system was designed to augment existing land-based wireless systems, not to replace them. If the phone can see an appropriate cellular or PCS system, it will make the call using that path. In the US with Qualcomm's phones, that means CDMA systems. In other places with other manufacturers' G* phones, that might be a GSM system. If G* phone cannot see a land-based system, it will search the skies and the call will go up to a satellite, down to a G* base station, and then to its ultimate destination through the same local or long distance telephone networks that ordinary phones use.
While the technical details are way beyond my feeble brain, the real genius here, in my humble opinion, was to enlist the financial and marketing cooperation and commitment of a number of the world's largest and most successful telephone companies. They became allies instead of enemies (although, as our friend Valueman might sometimes say, with friends like these . . . ) |
