I just imagine being a techie working for the cartel. In case you do not receive the ping, would you want to tell this to your violence prone boss: “Hey boss! Sooo. According to my calculations the significant investment you made in my idea should have pinged back by now. Maybe it is there, just there is something wrong with the SIM, or the antenna, or the network. Or maybe it is a few miles left or right on the coast and not getting cell signal. Or maybe the snorkel got swamped out on the sea and it stalled the engine and it is drifting somewhere. Or maybe our rivals nabbed it. Or maybe a random ship colided with it and it sunk. I hope this uncertainty is fine with you and won’t affect adversely our relationship, or how you treat my family.”
Don't ask me how a criminal operation holds together without either someone defecting and getting everyone killed, or someone killing someone else because they thought they were defecting. Presuming that it does, in fact, somehow maintain cohesion, I think they're all aware the submarine stuff is risky.
They're earning however many tens of millions of dollars per successful shipment and it's way higher than what it actually cost them to produce. And I'd guess they send perhaps ten to fifty shipments per year. Having 50% shrinkage is balanced by a 9999% profit margin.
This one, if it truly had no drugs in it, might have been a test run (risk-reducing).
> I think they're all aware the submarine stuff is risky.
Yeah, but that only works if you get feedback back. The problem is not that the submersible sometimes breaks down. The problem is if you only have a gsm modem on it which only sends data back at the end of the run you won’t be able to tell what went wrong, therefore you can’t improve on it.
“Boss, a big wave broke the snorkel and the craft stalled 36% of the way there. Richardo is welding a stronger snorkle on the next one as we speak.” Is what you want to tell your boss. This is the reason why they have telemetry.
The problem with launching the craft into the dark with just a gps sifnal is that it is too binary of a signal. You get one bit of information out of it: made it / didn’t made it. With that your ship can be 99% perfect and still only see the “did not make it” signal because of the last 1% of things not working.
You put in a cheap SIM card and it will pick up signal when you get close to the coast and send a message saying it reached its destination.