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."

Comments

Iridium Flares

[PK_ERTW]

One of the very cool things about the Sattelites is the Iridium Flares. Basically, they look like a slow moving, super bright shooting star.

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

bait and switch

[g4dget]

Iridium signed up for providing satellite phone service. If Iridium doesn't want to build those satellite services, fine, they should be let out of the contract. Then, the regulators should decide whether that spectrum should be kept in reserve for future satellite services or whether it should be made available for terrestrial services, or whether the decision should be up to the market. Once the policy has been decided, then there should be competitive bidding on that spectrum.

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 Costs

[RNLockwood]

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.

Re:I hope they don't put satellites in polar orbit

[Skuld-Chan]

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.