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Iridium May Have To Reinvent Itself Again
prgrmr writes "The Washington Post has this article on the latest wrinkle in the Iridium saga. There may be a conflict between new competition and existing contractual obligations for putting up the next generation of sattelites. This could become a milestone for making the service more ubiquitous, or the millstone that finally sinks it."
Not only will they have to reinvent themselves, but they will have to dodge falling satallites.
That way I can buy it extra cheap! The price should drop after each bankruptcy!
An I remember when the air was free. Aww, the good old days. Was it not on /. that I read that the FCC is wrong about the free airwaves anyway? I can not remember. There is no way that any company can really predict what it's business model will look like 10 years from now. What if in 10 years, they come up with a better way of communication links than satelite? Will the FCC refund their money? Hmm....
"This could become a milestone for making the service more ubiquitous, or the millstone that finally sinks it."
This is the cleverest turn of a phrase I have ever seen on Slashdot.
I have had the opportunity to see these first hand a couple of times, and I can say they are super neat. If you are ever out camping, look it up and see if one is gonna pass over head. The above mentioned site has lots of resources on where they can be found.
pk
Engineers arn't boring people, we just get excited about boring things.
Interesting enough if anyone cares, iridium the element was discovered when dissolving platnum using aqua regia (acid).
Click here or here.
If the widespread use of Iridium can be had, then (given their close ties with DOD, and therefore other branches of the govt, like, say, the NSA), Iridium can be initimately linked with Echelon. This combined with a tiny explosive placed within every Iridium phone, would allow Echelon to automatically eliminate anyone who, through their own words, would represent a threat to the security of the peoples of the US. It would also be an excellent incentive for those who use their phones but are behind in payments.
Isn't the whole point of contracts to sign them once you are sure that you don't need to modify them? If you may require modification of a contract, why not design it into the contract at the start? On the other hand, I am not a satellite communications company, so they may know more about dealing with the FCC than me.
That was stupid. Iridium satellites gave each degree of latitude the same coverage, making the coverage densest (per km^2) at the poles, even though that's where it was the least needed! Let's have a few low inclination satellites where people need them.
I saw it spelled two different ways in the threads here, but this is the correct spelling.
i swear my userid used to be lower.
When I saw the headline I thought they were bringing back the classic C64 game.
You know the one, sideways scrolling shoot-em-up but you can go left or right at your whim, (a la defender), also you can flip sideways to fit through tight spots.
It really needed fast reactions (which I no longer have), but was a lot of fun at the time.
I suppose if they did do it now it would be in full 3D and probably suck. Then again, the original would probably suck if I played it again now.
Better leave it alone and save those nice memories.
graspee
It reminds me of a used Porsche I almost bought. After some calculations, I found that I could afford to buy the car but I couldn't afford to keep the car on the road.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The article doesn't mention other companies in the same sector like globalstar that is doing the same but much better than iridim? It doesn't have a single word about g-star - it looks like cheating. Be reasonable ... or don't publish.
>
Iridium originally got that spectrum under the conditions they got it because they promised satellite service. If they are not going to provide that, there is no reason to give them a lucrative government handout of spectrum for terrestrial uses.
An analogy would be that the government gives a company a piece of land for $1 under the condition that the company turns the land into a park. A few years later, that company hits financial problems and says "oh, wouldn't it be so much more profitable to put a factory here".
Iridium is old technology. It is not the best quality, but if your in a third world country and you need to tell someone your in trouble what else are you going to use that is cheap?
They've dropped the dual service and brought there rates down (about $1.50 a minute). Their network is paid for so they seem to be in a pretty good position if you ask me.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
Osama Bin Laden's brother, Sheikh Hasan bin Laden, is [or was] a director of Iridium LLC, the company that brought Iridium out of bankruptcy. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, there were numerous press reports that the White House felt that Bush's movements in the late morning and early afternoon of September 11 were known to Al Qaeda. I have often wondered if someone in the greater Bin Laden clan was monitoring the extensive DOD traffic on Iridium. I emailed this theory to the White House, and to the FBI, but I never heard back from them.
The PowerPC lags behind its Intel and AMD competitors despite IBM's remarkable innovations in fabricating technology. The cellphone market, once Motorola's bread and butter, has been taken by the younger and hungrier Nokia. And we won't even get into the allegations of Motorola selling parts to make landmines to governments like Indonesia and Pakistan.
Motorola needs a drastic change in management, or it's not going to be around much longer. Last week I convinced my grandmother to dump all her Mot stock and go with Big Blue. I offer the same advice to all of you...
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
How the fuck could a person pay off their bills if they're just a fucking carcas? Don't you think slavery would better fit the situation. Say, $0.05 an hour for the rest of their pathetic lives. That should suffice.
You may be absolutely certain that the military and other government users don't pay nearly $1.50 a minute. In fact it's les expensive than the cellular costs that I am familiar with.
I tested the data service by using FTP to move some files this week and got a data throughput of about 4 seconds a kilobyte. The service compresses the data to get this rate. The rate was the same if I zipped the file and then sent it.
Iridium also provides secure encryption for the military and qualified governmnet users. A nice touch for those that need it.
Nate
Ha, people submit stories that actually get posted?!? That is the most ridiculous thing I have heard since someone said "Communism is dead," JFK I believe. The "submitter" of the story was simply CmdrTaco using good grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Hard to believe I know but just trust me...
Right, a contract once signed should not ever ever ever be subject to modification. People who sign contracts should have a firm grasp of all future events and circumstances or should just put down the pen. Next thing you know, we'd have divorce laws, the dissolution of the ABM treaty, Poland joining NATO, and Enron re-upping their accounting contract with Arthur Andersen.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a small mind."
Technological advances driven by wireless networking (both telecom and datacom) are starting to render obsolete the idea that spectrum is a severely limited resource that must be lorded and hoarded by the FCC. Ten years ago, during its planning, Iridium seemed like a technological miracle solution to an intractable problem. No one foresaw ubiquitous digital cell networks and two-cents-a-minute rates. Now these guys are supposed to peer another decade forward and once again envision what not only doesn't exist, but hasn't been invented...and then bind themselves to a cool billion or two of investment.
Stuff like this doesn't encourage innovation, it encourages entrenchment and protection of obsolete technologies.
You know this is just for the sake of twattish pedantry, but it was called "Uridium", not "Iridium".
I remember because I was so impressed by it on the C64, not least the noise the bay door made when you launched. I had an Amstrad CPC, and the Amstrad version was (as was all-too common) ported from the Spectrum, and was thus piss poor.
Christ, I must be bored.
The original problem with Iridium wasn't Motorola. The service worked (and still works) as designed. What went wrong, in my opinion, is that Iridium LLC targeted the wrong customer base! So, basically, the failure of the original Iridium can be chalked up to bad marketing. I should know...I used to work at the INA-H facility. 'Aikana
I never paid much attention to the Iridium company so I don't know if they fell out of the sky or not... but if they did and they want to put up a new, even more advanced generation of satellites then this isn't good for Radio Astronomers. If the original Iridium was interfering with their observations before, imagine how much trouble this new system will bring.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I'd say the small diatribe turn out connected to this particularly dull blurb shows another for the 'miss' column, eh Hemos?
Get back under the porch with the rest of the outside vermin, pls.
in certain situations such as offshore sailing iridium has the best cost/performance. other systems like globalstar don't reach offshore, and inmarsat is too expensive and bulky and requires too much power.
yes! this is a test. really!