<<I know where I'll get my data
since I won't mind waiting half a second for the download>>
Maurice, if we're speaking of downloads from a hand-held device that also works as a phone, space-based solutions other than G* are years away for the vast majority of the planet, including especially New Zealand.
New Zealand will probably never be adequately covered by GEOs for such devices because of your high lattitude. For the Western Hemisphere as a whole, there are no planned GEOs (nor assigned GEO slots, to my knowledge) from which such service could be offered. In parts of Asia, Africa, and the mid East, ACes and Garuda, which will offer G*-like sat phones, probably will offer data as well (maybe less efficiently than G* because they're GSM/TDMA), but only to countries within their footprint, which does not include much of the temperate zones or any of the W. Hemisphere. ACeS and Garuda are specially designed GEOs that can pick up the low power signals generated from a hand held mobile phone; such capability has to be designed in from the start and is not extant on any other commercial GEOs, to my knowledge.
At what price they offer these services remains to be seen. I've seen reports that ACeS voice service is likely to be priced at about the same $1/minute that G* customers pay.
The idea that GEOs are necessarily cheaper than LEOs for data (or voice) is not well founded, imo. User prices, as opposed to provider costs, are distorted by, on the one hand, the monopoly pricing power that Inmarsat has had and G* thinks it will have, and, on the other hand, by government subsidies of various village telephony services. So head to head competition of LEO vs GEO providing like services is very limited. (And ACeS and G* so far are nicely staying out of each others footprint, so it may be a while longer before we see such competition.)
So, I don't know how you figure <<A geo download for the same amount of data would be less than 1c. >> . |
