I have just wasted two days getting some of their stuff to work. I had to get it working because I am selling my old Motion LS800 tablet and one Thuraya XT phone. The buyer wanted it to work on the Thuraya dial-up service. So I bought a new Thuraya SIM card.
Firstly, Thuraya SIM cards do not work for data at all, out of the box. Not for 9.6k dial-up and not for GPRS (their two data services). You have to initially make a voice call, to any number, and you get a machine menu asking you to select your language (1 for English, etc). Somebody who is just using the card in a data device will never discover this!
Secondly, the Thuraya cards marketed all over the place e.g. this
do not work for the 9.6k dial-up and probably do not work for GPRS either. Definitely Thuraya SIM cards used to require special config (done by the distributor) to do GPRS. I wasted the 2 days because of this. Eventually they “reset” the new SIM card (not my old one; I don’t want them to break the GPRS functionality on that) and suddenly it works.
Thirdly, Thuraya seem to like randomly killing their 9.6k dial-up service on some SIM cards, possibly on SIM cards used for GPRS. This was a major reason why I wasted so much time on this: I was testing it with two client devices (both 100% definitely previously used on Thuraya 9.6k dial-up), two 7100 phones (likewise), and two SIMs (the 2nd one I had since 2009 and used it most of that time on dial-up). Nothing worked, which led me to conclude that Thuraya must have broken something at their end. But they denied it (both them and their Amazon distributor).
I don’t understand how a company which manages to pay for a Hughes satellite (2 or 3 actually) employs such useless people and engages in practices which must be generating a lot of support workload for them. Thuraya’s support is responsive but (like a lot of people these days) they just don’t read more than the first 1 or 2 lines of an email.
They are just handing business to Iridium (and its way inferior data rate) on a plate.
Peter, why don’t you just install an ADL120 or ADL110B in your panel? Then you will get more time to fly rather than figuring out how to make the satellite phone work 
I have my XT phone working well… this was mostly a heads-up for those who use the Thuraya dial-up service.
However, to be fair, there is the cost and speed angle too: Thuraya is much cheaper and much faster than Iridium. I can even run the Telegram messenger over Thuraya (and get Achim’s wx service over it, so even more ways to skin the cat).
And, increasingly, satcomms get used less and less because with 4G spreading, one often gets “intermittent but sufficiently working” connectivity when airborne.
