Aside from
pushing out around one phone per year (
at best), Iridium Satellite really hasn't had a major impact on the market over the past ten years. 'Course, that's probably because it's hard to have much impact after seeking bankruptcy protection in 1999, but we digress. Starting tomorrow, new life will be breathed into Iridium thanks to a merger with publicly traded GHL Acquisition. If all goes to plan, the merger will add over $200 million to the company's bank account, enabling it to pay down debt and develop a next-generation network of satellites to be launched in 2014. Furthermore, $160 million will be raised by issuing another 16 million shares at $10 a pop, and a new label (Iridium Communications) will be thrown on for good measure. Only time will tell if the world really is ready to adopt
satellite phones en masse, but if TerraStar's
latest deal is any indication, we'd say chances are
good halfway decent.
posted Sep 28th 2009 9:34AM
Doomed, they are!
at $6 per min calls to sat phones, i sure hope they get doomed
they filled for bankruptcy because it is much cheaper to have roaming network phone and has a better reception and customers want to have that.
The military forces though use Iridium to contact their loved ones and there is where iridium is stronger, in places that have no Cell-tower (reception), like deserts, mountains, valleys were there is no reception just serial killers with over sized butcher knives or chainsaws
Exactly...Engadget and it's clones seem to forget this was never intended for the mass market consumer. It is a niche. And the big problem is that it is an expensive niche that is tough to make a profit with.
Exactly. I work on satellite communications for the Air Force and I've used Iridium phones quite a bit in Iraq. They are more for large corporate and military use, they weren't intended for the mainstream public.
@maestro and ebayaholic: You're right that that's what Iridium is for *now* but it's very well known that it was "intended for" mass market. Check the original marketing.
In any case, the point is correct though that this will still just be a niche thing now, so Engadget's comments are offbase.
I remember seeing their ads when I was a kid.
When I was younger we had an Iridium sat-phone on our boat, with some modem add-on. That thing was sloooow, and the calls weren't much better. Have they come on at all?
you can develop a next-generation network of satellites which will be ready for launch in 4 years for $200M + pay down debt? for realz?
What an idiotic blurb this 'article' is. Iridium never really "got out" of the satphone market. Prior to bankruptcy in 1999 it had about 25,000 customers. Since emerging from bankruptcy in late 2000, it has grown that number to close to 400,000. And its commercial subscribers now outnumber military users. Do ANY of you people know what's REALLY going on with this technology?
This picture must be from the "be a fireman for a day" event they just had at our elementary school.
If it were cheaper by just a bit I'd think more people would be willing to at least experiment.
I have used them when climbing in remote areas.
Phone rental is about $10 day and calls $2 per min.
So very comparable to roaming with your cell in a foreign country
I worked in Antarctica for a while and the National Science Foundation has piles of these phones. It's the only satellite communications available at the poles. At the south pole station they use a huge bank of them as modems for e-mail when the standard data satellites go below the horizon. The NSF alone puts down a lot of $$$ for these things. There's lots of customers, but they're not average people. If you have a need for remote area communications there's only one way to do it and a few bucks a minute for a call in Antarctica isn't bad.
Pretty stupid article. Going form 0 to 320,000 subscribers is hardly 'one phone per year'. As to the comments: Calls do not cost $6/minute. They cost as little as $.75/minute and calling an Iridium phone can cost as little as $.99 wiht two-stage dialing. Why do we care? Because Iridium is instrumental in numerous situations around the world where there are NO other communications available. Tsunamis, floods, terrorist attacks, war. People who use Iridium are heros, saving lives. We live it daily as one of Iridium's Service Providers. I see comments form actual users. Perhaps non-users will educate themselves before making completely stupid comments?
Probably one of the most uninformed articles about Iridium I've read. After Motorola led them to bankruptcy a group of investors bought them out for pennies on the dollar, then proceeded to build them back up into a viable concern. This latest development is further testament to their growth. Iridum phones are not a cell phones. They are devices that communicate from anywhere on earth, like the middle of the Mojave Desert or Tahiti. Their not being peddeled as an executive's business phone (like Motorola tried to). Their a priority and emergency communications device and they've been the holy grail to a host of rescuers, hikers (like me), and servicepeople in Iraq and Afganistan (and anywhere else).
Read up before you blog!