I’ve had to make and pay for an unfortunate number of Iridium calls. They can be crazy expensive depending on carrier, who all bill them as a call to an international line in the country of “Satellite”. Usually you pay your carrier’s fee for outgoing and it’s cheaper/free to receive the calls.

It seems like cell carriers always charge more per minute for satellite calls than any satellite provider does, so I’m guessing they just set their rates conservatively to always make a profit on their end. And the demand for satellite calls seems like it would be pretty inelastic.

I've always assumed that answering a phone call would be free for me (excepting the dawn of cell phones when they had a limited number of minutes per month). If answering a sat-phone call is "cheaper" rather than free, does anything warn me that I'm incurring extra charges?

Paying to receive a call seems to a mostly American phenomenon. In most (all?) of Europe, receiving calls is always free, no matter where or how they originate.

I think now this is correct due to European laws, but not that long ago, if you were not in your home country and someone called you, you could be billed for the international part of the call. Nowadays the agreements telcos were forced to put in place means this is largely solved in the EU, and quite cheap outside of it.

This is why iridium supports calling their regular PSTN gateway and then dialing the satellite number recipient, then the satellite recipient pays a more palatable $1.50/minute:

https://apollosat.com/support/iridium-two-stage-dialing/

Receiving calls from Iridium should be free – the caller usually pays for the satellite portion of the call.

That usually makes Iridium -> terrestrial calls much more economical than the other way around, as telcos usually use the opportunity of terrestrial -> satcom calls to add on ridiculous margins. Conversely, satellite -> terrestrial calling is usually around a dollar per minute or less, these days.

In your situation, that would come out to a $50 (or maybe $25) charge per minute. Hefty, but that indeed seems to be at least in the ballpark of their listed rates (for prepaid here, for example: https://prepaid.t-mobile.com/connect/international-calling-r...).

Nice - thanks for digging. I'm guessing you're right, iirc it rounded up the number of minutes.