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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.
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.
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.
-- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
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
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".
There were two lines of growth there. Motorola thought they could assembly-line satellites and bring the per-unit cost down dramatically; almost all satellites today are custom-made, even the big "families" like the Boeing 601 and 702. Motorola was going to mass-produce identical Iridium satellites and get their per-uit cost down.
There was also going to be a boom in cheap launch technology. Companies like Rotary Rocket, Beale Aerospace, and Kistler were growing to compete for the business of keeping Iridium, ICO, Globalstar, and especially Teledesic in space. Since all four have scaled back or disappeared, the funding for the new launch technology development disappeared too. If they'd succeeded, the cost per pound to low orbit would have been 20% of the current price - making a large constellation affordable.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
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
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.
This is one of the things you learn as an amateur radio operator (because you get the chance to actually play around with real satellites) - you can have an eliptical orbit around the equator (phase 3), but a lot of the time the satellite can be as far as 50,000+ km away.
Polar orbiting satellites are nice because A) they maintain a pretty much constant height/velocity above the earth, and B) they can be recieved with handheld transcievers. Also its easier to predict passes. Disadvantage being that if you want 24-7 coverage you have to have a lot of them floating around (which is what iridium does, as well as a few other services)
BTW - just for your info phase 4 sattelites (geo stationary) suffer the same problem as Phase 3 sattelites - most of the time they can only be recieved with a fixed station using high gain antennas.