In 2014 "Yamzi unveiled ‘Odyssey’, the “world’s first satellite-enabled tablet designed and developed for education” and using Yamzi’s two geostationary craft “repurposed to offer an end-to-end learning infrastructure to serve remote or otherwise unreachable students”.
Buyers of the Odyssey device (at $150 a unit) should be aware that both Worldspace satellites are well beyond their end-of-life. Afristar was launched in 1998, and AsiaStar in 2000. Both had a design life of 12 years.
World’s First Satellite-Powered Tablet To Use Newtec Technology For E-Learning
I just found this too - seems they try to partner with governments though, I couldn’t see how one could buy the equipment as a private individual, or what the costs are - although I haven’t done an exhaustive search.
Each regional beam can provide up to 24 channels of 128kbps transmission speed, and Yazmi is working on a hardware upgrade to allow channels to be combined to achieve 256kbps data speed or higher. A customer purchasing at least 50,000 tablets would be allocated one 128kbps channel for its exclusive use. That channel could serve 50,000 tablets, or it could serve 50 million tablets without any impact on download speed.
A one-time service fee is bundled into the purchase price of the tablet. In return, the tablet receives unlimited downloads for as long as it remains in service. The cost works out to about one US dollar per month for an expected tablet service life of three years, or 75 cents if in service for four years, or 60 cents if in service for five years.
A single 128kbps satellite channel can transmit about 40GB per month. This means that the cost per GB of transmission is effectively as low as 2.5 cents per tablet. A 2G or 3G data plan would likely cost hundreds of times more each month per tablet and be unlikely to offer nearly as much
data capacity.
Didn’t realise, as the website was still up - I think that their pricing was way too steep anyway, certainly for, say, educational use in Africa. Billing for each tablet when they have a classroom server doesn’t seem viable.
It would be interesting to know if they ever delivered any of the tablets though…