You can pick up a mobile hotspot from any mobile carrier and get a decent mobile data connection in any city or town or the U.S., but that connection will disappear if on the top of mountain, a few miles into coastal waters or even in a cornfield in rural Kansas. What if you could buy a modem that worked anywhere?

Satellite communications providers Iridium(s irdm) and Globalstar(s gsat) are betting there is a consumer market for just such a mobile hotspot service. And by anywhere, I mean anywhere. Both have constellation of dozens of satellites that barrel through their orbits just above the Earth’s atmosphere. If coverage is what you’re looking for, you can get a Globalstar connection in the middle of the Pacific or an Iridium link at the North Pole.

The trade off is connection speed. Forget about 4G or even 3G speeds; Data links to low-Earth…