[citation needed] The geostationary nature of the service implies high round-trip times from satellite to Earth, leading to a noticeable lag being present during voice calls.

Thuraya's country calling code is +882 16, which is part of the ITU-T International Networks numbering group.

Transceivers communicate directly with the satellites using an antenna of roughly the same length as the handset and have a maximum output power of 2 watts.

As the handsets contain a GPS receiver, it is possible to program the ground position of the satellites as waypoints to assist with aiming.

A time-division multiple access (TDMA) time-slot architecture is employed which allocates a carrier in time slots of a fixed length.

[10] Amateur astronomer observations suspected that the nearby MENTOR 4 USA-202, a satellite belonging to the US National Reconnaissance Office, was eavesdropping on Thuraya 2, and this was reported to be confirmed by documents released on 9 September 2016[11] by The Intercept as part of the Snowden files.

On 15 April 2024, Thuraya 3 suffered an "unexpected payload anomaly" and despite attempted recovery efforts, coverage provided by this satellite was unable to be restored.

[16] Thuraya advised that they have suffered a sustained force majeure event and withdrew offering services to regions affected (such as Australia).