Iridium phones are capable of connecting another device to the internet, however data speeds are very slow with a maximum speed of 2.4 kilobits per second.

To put this into perspective, here are the speeds you generally achieve on a regular modern cellphone …

3G speeds are generally around 3000 kilobits per second (3 Mbps)
4G speeds are generally around 7000 kilobits per second (7 Mbps)

We’ve found that using an Iridium phone as a modem with a laptop or PC is difficult to setup and is incredibly slow and often unusable because the computer uses all the available bandwidth just with services that run in the background – this is before you even open a web browser or try to check for emails.

We can provide Iridium’s data setup guides on a USB stick with our rental phones upon request (add this in the customer comments field when ordering), which includes drivers for Windows and Mac. These files can be downloaded here: Mobal-Iridium.zip (45MB).

Due to the difficulty of configuration and probability of failure we do not provide support for Iridium data services.