UKC

Just back from Pakistan. We rented a Thuraya Hughes 7100 sat phone from a trekking agent but experienced various problems. It's an old model I know. I'm not really sure whether it was the phone or network that was to blame so keen to share and learn to avoid similar problems in the future. We were not keen to buy a Thuraya phone given it would not be our first choice for other parts of the world.

We read on third party websites that it was possible to send texts to Thuraya phones via email using the follow format:

<Sat phone number>@sms.thuraya.com

The messages bounced back with errors though. Thuraya customer support advised us that the correct format was in fact the following, with the phone number inserted in the subject field of the email:

sms@smsr.thuraya.com

These messages were received by the phone but the messages were a totally scrambled array of random numbers with the occasional letter thrown in. We also had a similar problem when someone tried to text from a Windows phone. I'm not sure whether the problem likely related to the phone operating system being too old, or if it is a general problem with the Thuraya network. Or whether we were doing something else entirely wrong. The Thuraya customer support were not a lot of help with the matter by this point. We received texts via the Thuraya website ok but had hoped to setup automated texts for weather forecasts via email.

Text messages were also taking about 24 hours to be received after having been sent. This meant weather forecasts were always a day old. Many texts that we sent were also never received. Is this typical for the network? Making calls on the other hand was was generally ok.

Thanks in advance to anyone in the know.

In reply to Mr. Lee:

Never had any problem in Nepal. Phone calls were fine and texts were pretty much instant although only a total of about 12 were sent/received. Didn't try the email option as a 10 minute walk out of base camp allowed you to pick up 3G from one of the masts on the Everest trail so used that for any data needs.

In reply to Mr. Lee:

I find Iridium are much better!

In reply to JdotP:


For Pakistan?

In reply to paulmck:


So same same network, different country? You can't email via the Hughes 7100 so guessing you had a newer model of phone.

In reply to Mr. Lee:


Yep, used a Satsleeve on an iPhone 4S. It has data capabilities but I haven't tested this and I would only use it for the simplest of text based emails due to speed/cost. Overall I was quite impressed with it.