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Thuraya - Overnight Star Dying?
08:44 a.m. EST Dec 13, 2004
In only two years, the Thuraya system has grabbed the entire Himalayan mountaineering market. Small and cheap handsets, decent minute prices and a good data speed paved the way to success. With last years addition of a second satellite and the Inmarsat RBGAN partnership the future looked bright for both the users and the Abu Dhabi based company.
Autumn 2003, the problem begins
But the first serious problems started already last year in connection with Thuraya activating the second satellite and moving the first. In an ExWeb news piece from September 24, 2003:
“Since yesterday, both Wally Berg’s Everest team and Adventure Consultants’s Ama Dablam team, led by Luis Benitez, have been experiencing trouble sending data via satellite. At this time, there’s no trouble with voice capability, only data. Wally and Luis report that even though their Thuraya phones indicate full satellite reception, data connections continually fail after only 15 – 30 seconds. Thus, they’ve been able to send in their latest dispatches. When asked about the trouble, Thuraya told ExplorersWeb that there is “absolutely no problem whatsoever”… but the fact is, expeditions cannot send or receive data and Thuraya’s Web site has also been down all morning.”
No action from Thuraya.
The situation gets worse
The spring of 2004 went by alright, with the exception of some “dead spots” (areas without coverage), but this September/October serious problems began on Cho Oyu. It was all reported at HumanEdgeTech on Sept 28:
“…The problem seems to start somewhere around Camp 3, where the Thuraya stops saying it’s in China and instead displays “Invalid Position”. Why the phone doesn’t jump over to “Nepal” we (or Thuraya) have no answer to at this point.
The problems continue as climbers move back to Base Camp. It’s reported that the “Invalid Position” stays and/or that it switches back to “China” - in any case it's no longer possible to make data calls.”
Several expeditions reported in to the Explorersweb office and we immediately got on the phone with Thuraya support at the head office in Abu Dhabi.
The first response from the nice support people were encouraging, “We have been talking to the technicians and they say they did some work on the server yesterday and that’s probably the reason, can we call you back?”. And they did already next day – but this time not in such a positive spirit. The support team now denied that any problems were caused by Thuraya and no one else had reported problems.
No action was initiated by Thuraya to solve the problem.
From worse to bad
Cho Oyu expeditions went home and new arrived at Himalaya for October climbs. Now the problems escalated. Out of 5 phones only one can send data. The phones are supported by different resellers and used by different users – all with a decade or more of satellite communication experience.
Michael Brown (Everest summiteer and Emmy nominated film-maker) wrote:
“I had many invalid position errors on the north side of Everest in October. I will check into this and send them a note when I get home next week.”
Dave Morton (Professional High Altitude Guide with Alpine Ascents – Everest summiteer), added:
“Do you have any update on all of this?? I am in Tokyo on my way back to the states and saw that Willi Benegas' NF team was having the same problem as me. 'Invalid Position' in the Khumbu with their phone. I assume that AC's in working since they are dispatching. We've brought ours back to the states and sent our Ama Dablam team with an Iridium. Can you pass along any info that you've been able to track down and whether we'll be able to count on the Thuraya in the spring?”
Luis Benitez (Professional High Altitude Guide with Adventure Consultants – Everest summiteer):
The deal with the Thurayas was AC has 3 phones. I had all of them sitting side by side, and on all I did a GPS locator, as well as a factory reset for settings, they all STILL went to invalid position Nepal off and on the whole trip, one day phone 1 and 2 would work and 3 would be out, then the next day vice versa, and on and on each day a different phone would not work.
Willie Benegas, Henry Todd, Tim Mosedale, ALL had the same issue, except with their one phone, they could not call the 100 number for Thuraya to troubleshoot. I could on at least 1 of my phones and did so many times. I spoke to Rashid and Sala there who walked me thru everything I already did at least 4 times before they acknowledged there was an issue they did not know about.
No resolution was made from those calls and for the whole trip, the invalid position kept coming up on the screen of different phones.
Anytime I also tried to do a satellite acquisition that would fail as well. I could get GPS on all 3 phones, but when they had invalid position Nepal on the screen, nothing else.
We e-mailed and called Thuraya a multitude of times about the problems.
And what did Thuraya say?
Well, they are asking for numbers. Phone numbers, MSISDN and IMEI numbers. When they get the numbers, they ask for more numbers.
Thuraya also claims that nobody is complaining. That’s pretty astonishing. We have written complaints mentioning 7 users and there are many more we've talked to.
Thuraya says it’s a foot print problem “…seems that your colleagues are located at the boarder area between Satellite 1 and Satellite 2 footprint. Therefore they are getting signals from both Satellites but sometimes their phones are failing to attach to the network (Yousif Aldoubi, Thuraya Ground Segment Operations)”.
The problem with that is that our test phone in Scandinavia isn’t working anymore, AND we had some Safari operators from Tanzania at the office today. They haven’t been able to do more than a minute or two of voice lately without getting disconnected. Sweden, Tanzania, Nepal? That’s one heck of a big foot.
Does Thuraya have any Solutions?
No, not really. We’ve been asked to reboot, acquire positions, remove and reinsert SIM card and pointing the antenna in different directions, but the fact is nothing works.
There is also reason to suspect a multitude of hidden complaints. Today, Friday - we did a little test. We asked a technical savvy but not satellite phone experienced person to try the phone from Scandinavia (same phone was tested OK for voice and data back in August). Voice worked fine, but data not at all.
Our friend called Thuraya support. They asked for… the number. So they got all the numbers and said they would call back. And after 30 minutes they did with a surprising message: “..Your phone is not activated for data – call this number in Holland…”. Since our phone had been activated for data the last two years and worked great two month ago, the Thuraya people certainly got us a little confused. To verify we checked with the local Thuraya representative and it showed that yes, the phone was activated for data.
The future
At present we see no future for Thuraya and recommend expeditions to look for alternative solutions at least as a backup.
Should the company be able to solve its problems we will be happy to use and recommend Thuraya again. But at this point - we can't even see them trying.
Image courtesy Team Adventure Consultants: Mike Roberts and Luis Benitez dispatching from Everest
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