The Short version:
While the people there are very nice, I ended up paying a lot of money for equipment that just did not do what they promised it would. I was unable to communicate at all for 11 out of 14 days, yet still paid full price. I would not use their equipment again and would not recommend them.
The Long Version:
My Girlfriend was in remote Brazil for research and we rented an iridium Go to stay in communication. We have used this exact same equipment in the past but rented it from another sat phone provider. On these occasions, it worked just fine, even in remote Namibia. We are very familiar with this unit, how it works, and its limitations. This time, renting from OCENs, the unit was unable to connect, or did not deliver messages after the first 2 days. Getting it to work on those days was much more difficult that our previous experience. It was essentially useless the entire trip.
The day we picked it up there were either no techs at the office, or the people who were there did not really know how to use their own equipment. We spent more than an hour just trying to get it to work properly. I had doubts but was assured their equipment would work perfectly for out location/situation. They also tried to convince me to use their own messaging program. Even though they could not get it to work correctly for more than an hour, and when they finally did it was awkward and inconsistent.
We spoke with them at length about all of this when we returned the equipment. All they had to say about it was “The unit appears to be working properly”. No refund, no explanation, nothing. They can easily check the log to see that no messages were delivered, and how infrequently it was used. we basically paid hundreds of dollars to carry their paperweight to South America and lung it through the forest and back. ~Zyr
satellite communication service