Twitter gets Satellite support

Twitter has announced a new partnership with major satellite providers to give their subscribers access to Twitter SMS, the original text-based Twitter service.

According to a statement released Thursday in their blog, the company has partnered with Iridium and Thuraya, the world’s two largest satellite providers, to increase the number of people that can use Twitter SMS worldwide. The company said the new partnership will help guarantee greater global access to the microblogging network.

“Now, even if phone lines and the Internet are inaccessible — for example, in a war zone or after a natural disaster — people will be able to share news and stay informed via Twitter”

The partnership keeps the company close to its original roots in SMS, which is the standardized text messaging feature found in cellphones and other mobile devices. When Twitter began in 2006, it was designed to utilize SMS to easily send a short message to a group of people. As the service grew, it launched its own platform aside from SMS.

Although Twitter has worked with a lot of carriers in the world, there are still some who dont support Twitter SMS. So if you carrier doesnt support it at the moment you can use "long codes" that Twitter made available.

After setting up a Twitter account for long code use, a user can put such a code in the “recipient” field of a text, and Twitter will automatically pick up their text and tweet it from their account.

So far, Twitter has set up long codes for users in the UK, Germany and Finland. Long codes are limited to outgoing tweets only.

Original Twitter statement