It has to be noted that the end users have grown accustomed to the rate of business and home environments, thus making the systems quite slow. Although this did not come as a surprise being that both systems were made for a marker for voice calls. Nevertheless, Iridium is only comparable to Globalstar in the single category of downloading highly compressible files while using their packet data sevice. This again, is due to Iridium's use of data compression technology. In every measure, Globalstar satellite phones are significantly superior to Iridium satellite phones.
Although both satellite telephones are searching for ways to improve their data rates, heavy users would find unacceptable the 2.28 to 7.62 Kbps data rates of the satellite phone systems. If the end user required only the download of files or emails limited to 100 kilobytes, then side-by-side testing shows that the Globalstar phone system offers a relatively superior data rate compared to the Iridium phone system under all conditions. This was not unexpected, given the basic technical differences that are inherent in the design of each satellite phone system. Also it indicates that Iridium can obtain up to 8 Kbps, the data rate will be much lower since most files that we use today are compressed to a certain extent. Iridium's compression technology will only be beneficial in a minority of instances.
The rate of successful downloads is the final research point. Iridium satellite telephones had a significant amount of failed downloads due to lost connections, stalls and spoofing problems. However, the Globalstar phone has a successful rate of 100%. This success rate covers both packet and dial-up scenarios and accounts for more that 80 attempted downloads. Iridium, on the other hand, had a download success rate of 70% for the dial-up scenario and 88% for the packet scenario, giving an average success rate of 79%.
“This information was referenced from an evaluation made by Satellite Communications Group of Frost and Sullivan”
