Iridium Service Plans

[rebel heart]

I have an Iridum 9555 that I bought from a retail outlet of satellitephonestore.com in San Diego. The sales guy was straight forward, but my relationship with the billing department has been rocky to say the least. I use a lot of airtime and data as it's for my job.

- Twice I've had them disconnect my SIM card from their network for no apparent reason. It only took a phone call (via a cellular number) to clear it up, but still, disconcerting for long passages.

- I've had them change my billing plan without my authorization.

- I've had them charge me for overage minutes in addition to my prepaid plan amount, even though the minutes weren't overage at all and were completely within my plan limits.

- Just recently it seems they've broken my data minutes out from my voice minutes. So my "200 minutes a month" is really "200 voice minutes + data billed at $1.01/minute".

- I use uuplus as well and have had great results with them.

Is the breakout of data and voice normal in the ~$200/month prepaid range? This is several months in a row now of getting my invoice and finding things that are either wrong or questionable.

[N3VR L8]

Hey Rebel,

Sounds like a very messy situation you have on your hands.

When you use data you are making a call, which like voice, is billed in 20 second increments, and shouldn't be billed any differently.

You are not truly using a pre-paid service, however, Satellitephonestore seems to be charging you for one. (I would bet there is orange on the reverse side of your SIM card)

What I suspect is going on, is they are re-billing you on top of their post-paid rates. While marking up a post-paid plan is quite common, charging for an allocation of minutes is not. Post-paid plans through Iridium have no allowances (for phones/voice).

When they are "disconnecting" I suspect they are actually suspending as reactivating an Iridium SIM is quite costly ($220+)

The rates don't seem outrageous, but I imagine they make up for that in the fee they charge for the "200 pre-paid minutes".

Let me know if any of that doesn't make sense for you and I would be happy to clarify further.

[hpeer]

I use Explorer Satellite Communications and have never had a problem.

http://www.explorersatellite.com