[villagetinker]

I hate to burst you bubble, but you will probably never see widespread use of satellite phones. There are very practical problems with the wide spread use of these phones. The most basic is that you would need a very large number of very expensive satellites to handle the calls. Then due to the very high cost of the infrastructure, the calls would be very expensive. There is currently only a very limited number of users that can afford these phones. The company I formerly worked for had these just in case the cellular network failed during a power outage, which came true during Sandy, and the following year during the October snowmegadon.