Reports say that MH370's last ACARS pings were received by Inmarsat.
If it's a fact that the pings were received by Inmarsat only, and not by ACARS ground stations, couldn't you deduce that MH370 was not in range of an ACARS ground station when it sent its last pings?
- ACARS is data source.
- There are different transports media, which could be used to transport ACARS data. (SATCOM, HF, VHF)
- No ACARS data were received as ACARS was probably switched off.
- Only SATCOM transport protocol 'pings' were received, as SATOM was not switched off, but did not received any data from ACARS to be sent.
- Other ACARS transports systems like HF and VHF were probably switched off.
- HF an VHF transports do not probably send any 'pings' as these are not needed for given transport layer. (I would expect, that these SATCOM ping are mainly to sync TDMA channel slot time and no such action is needed for HF or VHF)
So such correlation as you suggest is probably not useful.