[dghlsakjg]

Boats? Denver to California is basically only covered if you can see a paved road… and their aren’t a ton of paved roads. Let’s not get into Canada, even on the main highway there are plenty of dead spots.

Also, don’t overestimate their bandwidth. I rented a sat-phone once for weather updates mid Atlantic. Text only emails could take a minute to ul/dl with full reception.

[skimo8]

I think the UL/DL is more due to the design of the network (I’m talking about Iridium data packets). The connection isn’t persistent like a computer in many cases. For example, a handset does both passive and active checks at some interval rather than the satellites pushing messages down as they’re available.

edit: It’s also worth mentioning that the bandwidth is very limited, but I thought it worth calling out the above