Iridium Phone and Email / Weather Services

[GypsyHawk]

Is anyone familiar with X Gate and/or WeatherNet and there use on an iridium satellite phone? These are products I have seen advertised through Global Marine Networks.

[Paul Elliott]

Do a search here -- we've discussed XGate pretty extensively (I don't recall if anyone has had anthing to say about WeatherNet).

Executive summary: XGate works well, and Global Marine Networks seems to be a class outfit. They aren't the only ones providing these services though. I use XGate / Iridium on my boat, and get my weather data (GRIBs, WFAX graphics files, and text forecasts) emailed to the satphone from Saildocs.

[idpnd]

This is a tunnelling proxy that does email forwarding and data compression on the link - there must be a free alternative?

Edit: Proxify (free proxy) with ssh compression (putty on windows) or ziproxy (free software) on your own server

[idpnd]

List of comparable services, many free of charge: Web accelerator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Toonel.net - free of charge, appears to be a direct equivalent for web traffic and email

fasTun - free Web Accelerator service with HTTP compression (ad blocker, anonymizer) - browser plugin, just for web traffic

These would also be useful for any other metered web access (GPRS/3G etc)

[chala]

Ugrib, ViewFax, saildocs, works fine on Iridium when Iridium works fine.

[Paul Elliott]

For what it's worth, tunneling and compression services designed for generic internet or 3G networks are not necessarily optimized for satphone (or SSB radio) email service.

With Satphone and SSB, the latencies are very high, and the data rates are fairly slow, so the normal TCP/IP handshaking can really slow down the data throughput. Also, it is fairly common to drop the connection in the middle of a satphone or SSB data transfer, and typical protocols will discard the entire partially-sent message. With XGate (and no doubt other) satphone-optimized services, partially-transferred messages are saved, and at the next connection the transfer resumes where it left off. This is a hugely valuable feature.

I am aware that the "resume interrupted download" feature is available for generic internet service, but not all transfer programs offer it. XGate provides a well-optimized service that goes far beyond simple compression.

I keep mentioning XGate because I have been using it for a number of years, and have been quite satisfied. There may be even better options out there...

[GypsyHawk]

Thanks for all replies to date. They greatly assist my research towards making a better informed decision before I commit to any product.