The story I heard, and I don't care enough to even go looking for a link, was that some executive's wife couldn't make a phone call while on their yacht and thus the idea of Iridium was born.
Whether or not that is true (and I would guess it's either not, or heavily exaggerated), either your story or mine does seem to drive home the misplaced optimism of the Iridium investors.
Speaking for myself, when I'm touring the US on a motorcycle I can make do with some lack of cell coverage. If I really cared that much, and needed emergency communication, I'd bring a handheld amateur radio with which I can just about always hit a repeater when a cell phone has no signal. If I were to absolutely, positively have to have some means of emergency comms, I'd go buy a SPOT for a lot less than Iridium. And if Iridium ever had a chance to at least be viable, SPOT seems to have put a nail in that coffin.
So the market we're left with is folks that have a need to vocally chatter to someone else no matter the circumstances. There are only so many war zone reporters and mountain climbers to go around, though.
> There are only so many war zone reporters and mountain climbers to go around, though.
The U.S. Department of Defense is Iridium's largest customer by far, and kept them alive with a large cash infusion at one point (if memory serves).
Also, fun fact: iridium modems provide the only continuous data link for the U.S. South Pole station. There are 12 modems ganged together, used for e-mail and weather info transfer. Bandwidth: 28.8kbps. (the station also has several high-bandwidth uplinks, but the coverage windows for those are limited, and they have to compete with NASA/ISS for bandwidth).
When I was just about to get out of the military, I was offered a job as a radio technician at that station - 60k a year. I turned to my buddy (who had gotten the same offer) and said, "Who in their right mind would take 28 bucks an hour to work in Antarctica?"
That might be quite apealing to some. 60k isn't that little if most of life's necessities (housing, food, clothing, etc.) are provided to you for free.
Plus no relatives to ever deal with again, til you retire.
I would've probably taken the offer, but as it stands, I probably lack the qualifications required.
Minus mention of the yacht, the Iridium website (http://www.iridium.it/it/news.htm) states that in 1985 Motorola executive Barry Bertiger's wife, Karen,was frustrated that she could not make a call with her cell phone from the Bahamas to one of her real estate clients back in the US.
For some reason, I thought Iridium was supposed to be marketed to "international business" crowd. Isn't that why they were charging $3k and expected people to call a hotline only to leave their contact information and have a follow-up phone call sometime during the next 7 business days? Or did Motorola believe that the market was moving from analog to satellite, as opposed to analog to digital?
It was actually a wife of an executive on a cruise, not a yacht. It looks like you can get cell connections on a cruise now, but I think it took quite a while. Remember, this "idea" was born around 1990.
If you haven't looked, it's actually quite reasonable now to rent an Iridium phone for a backcountry trip these days. If I was taking some boy scouts into the wild for long weekend, I'd definitely consider it in case of emergency.
The system was really a great piece of technology; MOT really let the engineers go at it. If it wasn't for the billing and provisioning, you could actually make an Iridium-to-Iridium call anywhere on the face of the earth in some sort of doomsday scenario, since all of the call routing goes between satellites—you don't need a ground station.
When I started at MOT, we were working on the broadband followup, Celestri, which turned into Teledesic. Same deal, anywhere on the globe, but around a 1-2Mbps connection, rather than Iridium's 0.002Mb data rate. It was a magnificent piece of engineering with hundreds of engineers working in a fancy new building with plans in place to double the building in a couple years as hundreds more engineers were coming on for the detailed design phases.
We were about 9 years from operation and had thousands of pages of architecture and design documents. I think the highest-level system design document was around 500 pages when it was shelved, but there were already some architecture documents running into the thousands of pages.
The projected launch costs alone were around $15B; that's not including actually building anything. It was the most expensive commercial project ever undertaken, though after Iridium's disappointing launch, even the most short-sighted executive could see that it was too big of a risk for any company to take.
Looking back, it was an amazing experience to be a part of a project that huge.
Whether or not that is true (and I would guess it's either not, or heavily exaggerated), either your story or mine does seem to drive home the misplaced optimism of the Iridium investors.
Speaking for myself, when I'm touring the US on a motorcycle I can make do with some lack of cell coverage. If I really cared that much, and needed emergency communication, I'd bring a handheld amateur radio with which I can just about always hit a repeater when a cell phone has no signal. If I were to absolutely, positively have to have some means of emergency comms, I'd go buy a SPOT for a lot less than Iridium. And if Iridium ever had a chance to at least be viable, SPOT seems to have put a nail in that coffin.
So the market we're left with is folks that have a need to vocally chatter to someone else no matter the circumstances. There are only so many war zone reporters and mountain climbers to go around, though.
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