Satphone plans

Some time ago (and now archived) a member asked about cost effective Satphone plans.

Lots of people, including myself suggested the Telstra post paid option for Iridium phones where you can use a Telstra internationally enabled SIM in the phone. No extra monthly fees bla bla bla.

In practice this approach is less attractive that it appears. The main problems that I encountered are

1)SMS between the phone and Optus and Vodaphone only works sometimes

but more importantly

2)You have to pay for incoming calls at $4.00 per minute, and people call you for all sorts of reasons, including to sell you stuff you don't want, thinking it is just a mobile call. Consequently you tend to leave it off or tell people to SMS you.

Both Motherhen and Peter Horne [Krakka] suggested TR Telecom's plan.

This is great. $30 per month if it is activated, $15 per month if not. When Activated you get $10 of calls included. The best part is that they bill daily and don't mind how many times you turn it on or off.

Effectively this means it is $1 per day when activated and 50c per day when not activated with 33c of calls per day included when activated.
I asked if I could activate it on Friday then deactivate it on Monday on a regular basis and the answer was "sure, why not, we have lots of customers that do that"

What a great cost effective service. I now have a dedicated number and can leave both both phons on all the time ( Sat and Telstra). Now when people call me they pay for it. That should be "reduce the number of incoming calls".


Thanks guys.