Here is the sad reality. Neither Iridium nor Inmarsat are really resilient to having a global connectivity crisis spanning across continents.
Iridium is unable to do satellite-to-satellite for data/text/voice between devices on the same network. Inmarsat is capable of doing this, two handsets could have line of sight to the same satellite and the satellite will actually relay their data directly without going to Inmarsat datacenters.
However both Iridium and Inmarsat need their respective main ground stations active and operational for the authentication and account balance check of your handset.
So both would be unusable say water levels went up rapidly and we lost internet. These guys have their billing and user accounts data on AWS. Resiliency is not built in.
Here is the sad reality. Neither Iridium nor Inmarsat are really resilient to having a global connectivity crisis spanning across continents.
Iridium is unable to do satellite-to-satellite for data/text/voice between devices on the same network. Inmarsat is capable of doing this, two handsets could have line of sight to the same satellite and the satellite will actually relay their data directly without going to Inmarsat datacenters.
However both Iridium and Inmarsat need their respective main ground stations active and operational for the authentication and account balance check of your handset.
So both would be unusable say water levels went up rapidly and we lost internet. These guys have their billing and user accounts data on AWS. Resiliency is not built in.