Cellular Services vs. Satellite Services.

Today’s technology offers various types of mobile calling services. Two major are satellite and cellular services. Both types of services offer coverage in virtually any place at the planet Earth, but let’s check how both the satellite and cellular services operate.

What is a Cell?

You know that cell phone wireless technology has something to do with the cells. That’s absolutely right, because cell is in other words a geographical area that is within the range of a base station, which contains all network communication equipments including a radio receiver and transmitter. So, the cellular network consists of a number of hexagonal cells each having a local transmitter (a base station), which has the inbuilt capacity to provide connections for the cell phones that get on the territory of that particular cell.

There may be many GSM or 3G carriers offering cellular services in your area and they usually operate at the state or country level rather than on the local. Each cellular carrier has a Cellular Communication Exchange also known as MTS0 - Mobile Telephone Switching Office. It has all the information about all cells and customers listed together with handset numbers.

Differences between Cellular Services and Satellite Phone Services - Main Points

- A satellite phone can be accessed from any point in the world, even from sea, airplane, desert or a mountain.

- A cellular phone can only be used where there is such a service, cannot be used from areas where there is no coverage, or from sea, or from air or from other remote areas such as deserts or mountains. However, many GSM companies offer coverage at the biggest cruise ships as well.

- Satellite phone services offer the quality of voice transmission on a constantly excellent level, as the voice need not go through any cellular telephone exchange or Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

- Cellular services companies admit that there are always signal loss and voice interferences found in cell phone system. The more users make a phone call within one cell, the lower will be the quality of voice signal. Also if you are located far from the base station, at the peripheral area (the so called fringe areas) of a cellular site, there is certainly going to be a weak voice reproduction.

On the other hand, cellular services are way cheaper than satellite services. The differences described above, show a pretty clear distinctive fact that it is more suitable to use the cell phone services rather than satellite, unless you travel to Sahara every week in business.