Ocean Navigator Communications Newsletter #14

Fourteen Minutes Per Day

Fourteen minutes per day. That's the amount of time I spent online during the first week of my trip. Keep in mind, this is actual connect-time I'm talking about here. I didn't bother to add up the amount of time I spent actually fiddling around on the computer when I should have been enjoying the sailing. That number would have been a sad and disappointing one as it would likely reveal my geekish tendencies.

So fourteen minutes -- is that a lot? Undoubtedly, yes. At least for most of the recreational bluewater community. In these fourteen minutes, I checked email an average of three times a day (!) and downloaded regular text emails in addition to several attachments. Why so much email? Well, in addition to corresponding with friends and making sure to tell them how nice it was in Europe and asking, "now how cold exactly did you say it was back in Maine this week?", I was also relying heavily on email to stay in touch with the business, and get updates on my sister-in-law who was over nine months pregnant with my first nephew. So a daily email check wasn't enough for me. A morning check, a late afternoon check, and a nighttime check became somewhat standard.

How much did all this cost? Well, at $1.50 per minute, I used 143 minutes for a total of $215 over 10 days. About half of these days were shore based days where I was checking email (via satellite) from a hotel room or even in the car. No, I wasn't driving. Why bother with a sat-phone from a hotel? Believe it or not, it was cheaper. At least cheaper per minute after you factor in the hotel's access charge, and long distance fees. My ISP had a local number in Spain (available for a small surcharge) but none in Portugal. So for a quick, two minute email check, my $3 connection was reliable and relatively inexpensive. Once I started downloading attachments, there's no question that the hotel's landline would have allowed me to save a considerable amount of money. Even with a higher per minute rate, the faster connection - nearly 20 times faster - meant that I would have only spent a minute downloading a photo that took four minutes on my sat-phone. Ironically, the GSM mobile phones I looked into renting for use in Portugal would have cost $2 to $3 per minute.

What about good old fashioned voice calls. OK, I made a few concessions here and did some talking. Not a lot, though -- only 26 minutes in 10 days. People seemed to be generally concerned about my wallet, "Well, I won't talk long since I know you're on a satellite phone and that must cost a lot of money!" Even with my pleas, "No it's not so bad, and besides I need to test the phone," they still felt too guilty to talk for very long.

So, a total bill of $295 in order to stay in touch with the business and see photos of my nephew hours after he was born seems well worth it to me.

In retrospect, I could have saved money and been more frugal with my email use especially on an ordinary cruise. For one, I would have made use of Iridium's Direct Data service which would have knocked about $75 off my bill due to its $0.99 data connection rate. Had I not had a pending birth to occupy (and resultant photos to download) I probably would have checked email only once a day and rarely spent more than 3 minutes online. This would bring the data portion of my bill down to about $30 instead of $215. So $30 for data, and another $39 for voice calls. That works out to around $7 a day in communications costs to be in touch daily. Not bad considering how expensive this would have been a few years ago.

For those of you interested in the gory details, I'm happy to send along a file with a listing of calls for your own analysis. Just send me and email at dpiltch@marinecomputer.com and request the Iridium Data file.

- Dan Piltch
dpiltch@MarineComputer.com

P.S. - My nephew was born healthy on May 30 weighing in at just over 8 pounds. We all saw photos within 24 hours!