I recently went on a trek to South Greenland and was dependent on my Zoleo device to meet my pickup. I was dropped off by boat and was hoping to give a map pin to the charter boat to pick me up along the fjord.
It turns out that the Zoleo is limited in its connectivity in Greenland. Any message successfully goes from your Zoleo unit and application up to the satellite and then out to the network. However, the backhaul provider for the SMS seems to not integrate correctly with Greenlandic phone numbers. Anything to a +299 country code appears to not work at all.
First of all, there’s a little bit of user erron on my part. Whenever you send a message using the Zoleo, it provides two checkmarks, one when it goes to the satellite and two when it is actually delivered. I was getting a single checkmark assuming everything was good because that’s all there was. There was no secondary gray checkmark or a red X when it failed. So the user interface on the Zoleo could be improved to address this failure.
The result was that we sat thinking our messages were getting through for a full 24 to 36 hours, hoping our texts would go through. We were fine. We had extra food. Finally, it occurred to me that something was just wrong and we weren’t getting any responses back. I don’t go anywhere remote without two of anything that is. critical. And in this case, the lesson is don’t bring two Zoleo devices, but bring something that has an alternate network as neworks, satelites and othe single producst can fail. I brought in a Iridium satellite phone and was finally able to get out using the sat phone.
Yes, there was a significant problem, and yes, the UI on the Zoleo could be improved. However, I reached out to Zoleo and got a Zoom phone call this morning with none other than the CEO. My concerns were taken seriously, and they have taken proactive measures to rectify the situation as best they can. It appears that they’re going to implement a number of things to make the user interface more clear and to rectify the situation.
No company, can have control of the Greenlandic phone network and the interchange there. I can tell you I am quite satisfied with their response, and I cannot imagine Garmin even giving a shit in this situation. Let alone having the CEO peers personally reach out to me.
