Globalstar flies highest, with orbits at ~1400 km. Starlink is at ~340-550 km. Per satellite, a higher altitude sees a larger portion and provides greater angular visibility of the Earth's surface at any one time. Globalstar is suited for low-power devices, emergency sat messaging, and IoT, not broadband speed. One reason they made a good fit with the iPhone. Also the valuable spectrum.

9.6Kbps

Not a joke

Well that’s more than most people can get out of Leo today so it’s a start!

Au Contraire, that bandwidth is definitely a joke.

Does it also make modem sounds??

9600bps ought to be enough for anyone.

Thanks, Bill.

That's their legacy product.

2nd gen is 256 Kbps

2nd gen was 72kbps, never got to 256. Apple stepped in and got them to write the whole 2nd gen Duplex network off before it got that far.

That's enough bandwidth to play Trade Wars and SRE so it's good enough for me.

Why no Legend of the Red Dragon? :(

What about LORD?

:-)

Tangent: SRE was very color-heavy and that led to some long ANSI sequences. From the recently decompiled source [1] you can see that I tried to pick shorter ANSI sequences when I could. In particular, going from color 0x0* to 0x1* we could save 1 byte, and going back to the default white on black we could save between 1 and 4 bytes. But if you're bandwidth limited there's also an option to turn off color entirely.

[1] https://github.com/joeshaw/sre-reconstructed/blob/main/src/s...

The spectrum and various other rights are probably worth more than the current kit.

They are serving different needs.

And starlink?

i would think that globalstar is specialised in IoT and Starlink more as an extention of the cellular coverage.