Interesting article on Globalstar’s new GSP-1700 “Sat-Fi” small terminal and service for GA in AOPA Pilot magazine’s Oct 2015 issue.
Built-in wifi hotspot, 36 to 72kbps in flight with new aviation antenna (pending STC this month), $40/month, terminal costs $1000 plus installing.
Data rate upgrade planned next year to 256kbps.
Coverage: North and South America, Europe and Australia. No roaming charge for Europe.
They at least admit nobody will actually have 256kbits/sec, and they forgot about Thuraya, which is offering 50kbits/sec right now, and it actually works 
Well, you have to switch the phone on, wait for it to get a GPS fix, and then it is some 10-20 minutes before it actually works for data (something I bet Thuraya won’t admit to) but after that it works fine, and I have been sitting at FL-anything getting all the wx data (including radar sferics and IR images) and even chatting on Telegram.
It’s interesting if Globalstar actually works. The company nearly went bust. Their satellites gradually packed up and eventually only a little of th coverage worked. They ran out of money.
256k would be nice but
However, and this is a huge issue with satphone data, I have now had to firewall the satphone connection to use just some private sites, and Telegram. This is because the OS was treating it as a network connection, not dial-up, and various apps were doing “secret” comms, sending data back to their churches (Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc) which would easily totally trash the connection. I tried firewalling the offending IPs etc one by one but clearly the apps (e.g. Chrome or IE) are written to do this covertly, and they hit some special IP to download an ever-changing list of current IPs they can use so there is no chance of blocking it, because as soon as you block one you find it is sending the covert garbage to another one. Obviously most of this covert data is not configurable. Some is, like Bing updates of some sort (megabytes of data), but even after that IE has a dozen other chatter channels.
That looks very promising indeed.
Im probably going to invest in some sort of WX download equipment for next season.
Considering the ADL130.
But the Globalstar would do all of that + voice, and you won’t need a Deutsche weather dienst subscription. You can then just have the WX painted directly in the Garmin Pilot App, avoiding having to flip between to different apps when flying.
Hope the Antenna STC comes soon
On some Emirates it has been free in business and first for some time.
I assume they must negotiate some pretty substantial discounts. Inmarsat can provide a service to yachts with unlimited data any where in the world using one of the fleet broadband domes. The data packages are horrendously costly however – £2K a month will give you all you can eat it the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific – just like sitting in your own lounge but with the nearest land thousands of miles away.
VSAT is the least costly for yachts with monthly unlimited packages less than a quarter that of Inmarsat – and I see they do aircraft installations – but I think coverage in the southern hemisphere is poor.
Inmarsat are of course also in the market, and in terms of pricing appear to be somewhere between the two.
I’m no expert on this either but there is active development (new generation of Ku-band and also Ka-band). Satellite data link doesn’t have to be that expensive. To some extent it’s question of priorities (can you sacrifice some reliability in favor of bandwidth? etc.). People want to stay connected, even in airliners and on cruise ships. The old slow and expensive solutions don’t cut it. So we have new solutions aimed specifically at those markets that promise even hundreds of Mbps and much cheaper data.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
The data packages are horrendously costly however – £2K a month will give you all you can eat it the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific
As long as you have decent speed and truly unlimited tariff, 2k is not that much. There were times I spent more on terrestrial networks.
If a boat is 2k/month, imagine what an airliner would cost… Boeing recently pulled out of that business, citing insufficient demand. Well, obviously, not at the price because we all know that everybody over the age of 2 must have H24 internet today 
Putting alcohol in the baby milk is not “correct” anymore so Ipads are used now.
I thought somebody did a very cheap and low data rate (text) service over short wave (“HF” in ATPL-theory speak) for boats? That would work for planes too, because tafs and metars are usually good enough for in-flight wx decisions.
Satellite data link doesn’t have to be that expensive
Agreed, but humans will always price a product at what the market will pay. Commercial, or any other non-commercial product or offering
2k is not that much. There were times I spent more on terrestrial networks.
Probably, however, your employer paid that. I met a “banker” guy at a party in London (as I do, all the time…) who was spending GBP 1000/month on his phone, travelling to e.g. Russia.
But in reality most people won’t pay that. Iridium data (e.g. the ADL120) is now down to something like €30/month (plus €1000-2000 for the box) and even at that, the takeup is not great. OK; the IFR GA community itself is very small and that will ultimately cap it, but if you want volume you have to be way below that price. And people who fly below say 2000ft (90-99% of GA?) can use their phones, especially on 4G/LTE. So the market is what is left between those two.
I should really get the ADL120 which is the way to go for IFR (IMC enroute) but I am still playing with the Thuraya kit… it gives me access to potentially any internet site, whereas all Iridiums based services must be limited to specific private servers and prepackaged data (due to the low speed).
Peter wrote:
If a boat is 2k/month, imagine what an airliner would cost
Now consider how many people you have on board and how many trips per month the plane takes (not to mention that airline will have access to better deals). Internet access is a big thing for travelers. I think I read somewhere (a while back) that in Germany people seemed to prefer slower trains because of this.
Peter wrote:
I thought somebody did a very cheap and low data rate (text) service over short wave (“HF” in ATPL-theory speak) for boats?
I don’t know about that. On the amateur side of things, there is APRS. And for aircraft there is the HFDL supporting ACARS/ CPDLC (controller-pilot data link). This should be fairly easy to do but light GA doesn’t typically carry HF equipment. I thought people these days prefer satellites.
Peter wrote:
humans will always price a product at what the market will pay
Of course. And there is much cheaper and faster (at least in the down direction) satellite data link available than what you get with your typical satellite phone. It’s just silly to use infrastructure designed for mission critical applications for watching youtube. And consumers are understandably not interested in paying for it. We’ll have to wait and see whether those projects succeed. In my mind, as you push more data through a satellite, it should get cheaper.
Peter wrote:
your employer paid that
No, I paid for that out of my pocket. There wasn’t really an alternative if you needed a connection on the move (satellite was even more expensive and the equipment was less portable). Fortunately I was spending so much money with the cell network that I could get some very nice deals. Otherwise the invoices would have been truly ridiculous. And there was no roaming in it.
I always pegged yachts as big money pits. But I agree, ordinary consumers won’t pay such prices. I just don’t consider 2k per month too much if it’s reasonably fast (at least 1 Mbps down) and has unlimited data (at that speed, no funny business like reducing the speed to a crawl after a GB).
However, I was talking about airliners and cruise ships. They are not targeting such solutions at light GA.
On the amateur side of things, there is APRS. And for aircraft there is the HFDL supporting ACARS/ CPDLC (controller-pilot data link). This should be fairly easy to do but light GA doesn’t typically carry HF equipment. I thought people these days prefer satellites.
HF could be done with much more compact gear than it is today IF you want to receive-only. There are too many airports (c. 10k I think) to continually broadcast all the tafs and metars every 30 mins at a low data rate, but one could have a service whereby you program a route (before departing) and you get a constant feed of airport data within say 200nm of it.
One problem might be that HF (as in amateur radio) is limited as to what you are allowed to put on it. A sovereign country can broadcast what it likes (hence e.g. the numbers stations) but if you did this within say Europe you would probably get busted for transmitting data.
I thought somebody did a very cheap and low data rate (text) service over short wave (“HF” in ATPL-theory speak) for boats? That would work for planes too, because tafs and metars are usually good enough for in-flight wx decisions.
Yeap, SSB in boat talk with Pactor modems being the master. It is not quite free because you sign up to Sailamail that tether you to a global family of SSB stations that provide the shore based links, but it is almost free and not related to the volume of data. With the latest modems the baud rate is pretty good . In theory it might work in an aircraft I guess but with a suitable SSB installation and Pactor modem. The latest generaton will achieve 5,500 bps which I guess isnt too bad.
BTW Fleetbroad band will provide an always on service that in practical terms for web browsing is very little different to home broadband but will be noticeably slower if uploading large amounts of data.
