[Uberschaf]

I was talking to a cell phone salesman and asked when I could expect my satellite phone and he told me that is too expensive and very hard to get a signal.I said that I can get xm radio and gps right here and I believe they are satellite.He never said a word after that.

[rexxfan]

I think you're right about reception. That's not the issue. I believe satellite phones are expensive mostly because phone calls are 1-to-1, whereas things like XM and GPS are 1-to-many. There's only so much bandwidth available and consuming it on a 1-to-1 phonecall is way less efficient than a single stream of XM going to thousands of listeners.
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bc

[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.

[TJ_Woody]

The other problem with satellite phones is the delay. When you are talking it takes a couple of seconds to reach the receiver and an equal time back. Some of the low earth orbit systems have negligible delay, but the geosynchronous systems will drive you nuts trying to have a conversation.