Duneman is one of a small but growing army of ultra-road-warriors who often wander far beyond the reach of even the faintest cell-phone roaming signals–and are willing to spend big bucks to stay plugged in while doing it. These Internet-addicted trekkers are turning to what has long been considered the last resort of the “connectoscenti”: portable satellite links. Despite a reputation for bulky equipment and slow, spotty, exorbitantly priced connections, on-the-road satellite Internet access has improved to the point where tens of thousands of users now roam mountain, ocean and jungle with a reliable online link tucked in a slim briefcase. “Sometimes you have to know what’s happening at the office,” says Kevin Hughes, a US Airways dispatcher who packs an Internet-enabled satellite phone alongside his underwear when he travels. “What’s that peace of mind worth?” Improvements in the next few years may shrink always-connected devices down to pocket size, for a price that even vagabond students can afford.
The current gotta-have-it among the wired peripatetic is an ultralight, laptop-computer-size satellite terminal with an antenna built into the lid–which will set you back $1,500. The service, called regional broadband global area network, or R-BGAN, is offered by London-based Inmarsat. You hook up a laptop to the terminal and access the Internet as you would in your home or office, at speeds about five times as fast as a dial-up connection. The service costs about $10 for every 600 pages of text, 15 typical Web pages or 20 photos you download or send–about what you’d typically pay for dial-up access in a hotel room. The only drawback: you have be outside, or at least next to a window, with no trees or buildings blocking the line of sight to the satellite 36,000 kilometers up.
That’s not a problem for Duneman. Sky is the one thing he’s got plenty of in Afghanistan, where he’s managing the construction or renovation of 130 rural schools and clinics throughout the country. Because construction crews are racing the onslaught of heavy snows expected by November, Duneman wanted to cut out the interminable delays caused by driving four hours to get to a phone in order to submit engineering changes and progress reports. Last year a 22,500-kilometer road construction project was held up eight days by slow debate about the appropriate shape for drainage ditches.
Now when Duneman visits sites, he routinely fires up his R-BGAN terminal and IBM laptop–he charges them with his car’s cigarette-lighter socket–and swaps site photographs, spreadsheets and blueprints with engineers, foremen and planners around the country and in the United States. He also researches contractors and equipment, and tracks the progress of storms across the Himalayas. “I’m getting more information more quickly with less travel,” he says. “It’s hard to imagine doing this without Internet access.” He figures he’d have to scratch 30 of the school and clinic projects if it weren’t for the satellite link.
R-BGAN, whose coverage is limited to Europe, Africa, India and the Middle East, is actually just a warm-up for the full-fledged BGAN service scheduled to come online next year when Inmarsat launches the two largest commercial satellites ever made–each as big as a double-decker bus, with 48-meter-wide solar panels. BGAN will cover the world (except for near-polar locations), double the service’s speed and use terminals that are half the size and up to 30 percent cheaper. The automotive and oil industries, who field many far-flung technicians and managers, are already big R-BGAN users, and BGAN should expand the market several times over. “People think satellite data service is about dishes on the home,” says Inmarsat executive Frank August. “They don’t realize this kind of mobile service is right around the corner.”
E-mail-starved travelers have an immediate, less-expensive alternative to BGAN: coat-pocket-size satellite phones with built-in modems for attaching laptop computers. At prices starting at about $600 for the hardware and $1.30 per minute of usage, data-enabled satphones from Iridium and Globalstar offer a reliable, if slow, link to the Internet from anywhere in the world–including the poles.
Polar access was a definite plus for US Airways’ Hughes, an exotic-vacation enthusiast who spent two months in Antarctica on an icebreaker last year. With the airline struggling to emerge from bankruptcy, and his own work schedule up for negotiation, Hughes, 58, kept a virtual office presence via e-mail to his managers and colleagues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, banging missives out on a laptop and feeding them to an Iridium satphone. He also used e-mail to manage the care of his ailing mother during his vacation to Afghanistan, and when in Iraq in February, he e-mailed a detailed daily travelogue to friends. “I used to try to cram it all onto postcards by writing very, very small,” he says.
More of us are likely to follow Hughes’s lead in the next few years. Satellite data links have already become routine gear for many soldiers, as well as for mountain climbers, boat captains and pilots, who need to track weather and other information critical to safety. Transportation companies often depend on them, too, to monitor the location and condition of trucks and other vehicles. Now satellite service providers are also going after business travelers and consumers. Iridium’s data services have been growing more quickly than its voice services for three years, with about a third of the satellite traffic already dedicated to data. “Once someone figures out how to integrate a satellite data link into their business operations, they tend to use their phones more frequently and for longer times,” says chief technology officer Mark Adams. Iridium is also rolling out a new line of more data-oriented handsets at the end of the year that should make the service easier to use and less expensive.
Packing a handheld satellite Internet device on trips may even end up as routine as carrying a cell phone. “The demand is definitely there,” says Ahmad Ghais, president of the Mobile Satellite Users Association in McLean, Virginia. Demand for mobile data via satellite could reach 5 million users, from 100,000 now, if services improve and costs drop, Ghais estimates. As cell phones continue to take on more data functions, customers might get used to having access to e-mail wherever they are–and won’t settle for losing that access just because they move out of signal range. “Cell phones are raising the bar on what the average consumer expects,” says Inmarsat’s August. It’s hard to imagine a teenager going to Antarctica or the high seas without instant messaging–which, fortunately, most satellite devices support. Isn’t that just 2 good 2 b true?
