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Iridium Files for Bankruptcy
MadShark writes "I found this article on Excite about Iridium LLC filing for bankruptcy after defaulting on 1.5 billion dollars in loans. But don't be too hasty about throwing out that handset. The article also says, "Motorola said it would continue full operational support for Iridium and all current and future
subscribers during the company's reorganization. It said it would continue to invest in the
technology and to develop the next generation of Iridium products."
Iridium uses sat based switching. Globarstar uses all ground based switching.
Okay, all INTERNATIONAL CALLS must be switched on the ground.. how about that.
Meaning the Telco's couldn't let someone call from USA to England over sat without making a long distance. And the switching capabilities are't very good.
Also, no Sat to Sat switching either.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
End of life for this class of satellite is not when it re-enters, but when the expected reliability of the electronics, battery, and solar array fall below a certain desired level. Typically, some amount of propellant is reserved to do a deorbit burn to take the satellite out of its position, and cause it to fall back into the atmosphere and burn up over a long (25 years?) period.
The main problem Iridium has now is that they have to change their marketing strategy. This is going to take time. By the time they even start to break even, not considering paying the loans they have, they are going to have to launch new satellites. These LEOs only have about a 5 year lifespan. So if they can turn this company around they will run out of time because of the satellite lifespan.
Actually, Iridium does satellite to satellite switching. Globalstar does ground switching. Both systems have pros and cons. The advantage of switching on the ground is that you keep the satelites simpler==less expensive and have fewer regulatory problems. The con is more ground station and more exposure to weather outages due to the ground station placement.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
GEO sats have drawbacks too. Most importantly, it takes a fsck-load of propellant to get out there.
So, you have hundreds of high speed satellites wizzing around requiring a load of fuel to keep on track. (And when the fuel runs out, the satellite is dead and needs replacing)
A GEO satellite requires an order of magnitude or two more propellant than a Low Earth Orbit Sat. Frequency of replacement of the satellite is driven less by running out of fuel than by the life of the electronics. Also, GEO satellites do _not_ just "stay put". The amount of fuel needed to keep a GEO sat from drifting across the sky is incredibly higher than that needed by a LEO sat to stay on track.
Another point - GEO satellites require the largest launch vehicles to get up there. LEO sats can be launched on just about anything, and in a constellation like this one, several sats can be launched by a single launch vehicle.
And if a single one goes wrong, the chances of it colliding with another are remarkably high, thus wiping out the whole lot in that orbit. (Well, risiking doing so...)
Hmm... FUD. While it is within the realm of possibility, and certainly taken into account during the design, these things are spaced so far apart that collision just isn't going to be that much of a danger.
Some issues you didn't mention that I find to be much bigger... Unlike GEO, these sats are up near the radiation belts (which is why electronics life is the limiting factor for the system.) And simply _producing_ the quantity of satellites these constellations need is a logistical trick that aerospace companies are not used to. And a constellation of hundreds of satellites are really, really expensive.
Like anything else in life, there's trades. GEO sats are good for some applications, LEO constellations good for others. Personally, I wonder if constellation systems can provide all that much more than ground based systems. That said, I do think things like Iridium are cool, and I hope some of the follow-on systems have a chance to get off the ground. I'm sure there's a niche to be found someplace, and the idea of being telecommute from anywhere in the world (i.e., travel the globe without ever taking a day off work) is just too cool. ;-)
Commies suck, they are twisted, any sharing of tech with them is in the worst interest of the west and japan. Stop providing your enemy the means to destry you.
Commies suck, they are twisted, any sharing of tech with them is in the worst interest of the west and japan. Stop providing your enemy the means to destry you.
Not only this but coming from 3 years in the cellular industry I can tell you one thing:
The Iridium concept and business model is CRAP.
Just the issue of upgrades to the space borne switches involves enought cost that a operator could plant switches and basestations covering
hundreads of additional square miles. Most
experts in the telcom industry knew first hand
that the develpment of the Iridium project was
proght about by PHB and has been military
contractors. Ever wonder why Motorola is the
only handset provider supporting this?
Most likely because the State Department made them disable coverage over Cuba.
You Americans regard the Chinese as ENEMIES??? But then you've got a history of going out of your way to find trouble and pissing people of. -t. (worried Down Under. And, no, your average Australian does not want 'merkin marching girls and boys at our Olympics.)
Not to mention ./-addicts who will certainly suffer from eye cancer. -- Troll my ass.
You still have to get liscenses to use frequency spectrum in *every* country you offer service in.
Damn someetimes I wonder why I even read this page.
You know any time you get BOTH Raytheon and Lockheed in on a commercial venture, you will get fucked up the ass sooooooooo bad, you wont beleive it. an ex-employee.
Oooh, you had me for a second. Iridium is 77 and Dysprosium 66, a reasonable decrease in the number of satellites. I couldn't find out how many satellites they have, but I did find how Dysprosium was named - http://www.frognet.net/~jaknouse/ science.html#E66
66. Dy: Dysprosium
name: Dysprosium derives from the Greek for "hard to reach."
Yeah, again Lockheed Martin. Go fucking figure. Having 3 years working with DoD and contractors, the fuckups are *unbeleivable* and jsut plain *scary*.
The idea is cool... so cool that they would probably outlaw vacations (as in "day off"). Be careful what you wish for...
It's 5:00. Isn't time for you to kill some abo'? When you're finished with that, please tell the rest of the world how to live.
According to legend handed down during Motorola brain... er... training, the idea for Iridium came from some VPs wife who couldn't use her cell phone to make a phone call in the Carribean. The VP came up with this concept for a cellular phone that would work anywhere in the world.
10 years, billions of dollars later...
An engineer in the group I work in took an Iridium phone with him to the Carribean a few months ago to try it out. He tried to make a phone call... it didn't work.
Actually 77 was the original number of satellites they wanted, hence why they named it Iridium - after the 77th element in the periodic table of the elements. The number of satellites they ended scaling back to was 66. Element 66 is Dysprosium. Somehow I can't imagine them naming it that, as it sounds more like an anti-depressant than a global satellite telecommunications network.
They get people to pay exorbitant amounts of money for lung and throat cancer. Can't help but think that the legions of people talking on their cell phones while they drive are a lot like the drug addicts puffing on their cancer sticks.
'j' is what engineers use when we mean sqrt(-1). 'I' and 'i' are used for current so using 'i' for sqrt(-1) would make electrical engineering equations impossible read since imaginary numbers are used all the time in electrical analysis. Other engineers also use j to mean sqrt(-1) because the same techniques and equations that are applied to electrical engineering can be applied to other systems so it's nice to keep things consistent.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I did a job a while back for Inmarsat. Inmarsat are lucky - they have geostationary satellites, which are a patently good idea because they stay where you put them, so to speak. Of course there is almost no room for geostatic satellites left but hey...
When anyone in the inmarsat offices mentioned iridium everyone burst out giggling. Low Earth Orbit is a JOKE. Do you have any idea how FAST those things have to go to stay up at such a low altitude? And because the go so fast they are only overhead for a short length of time, so you need so damn many. So, you have hundreds of high speed satellites wizzing around requiring a load of fuel to keep on track. (And when the fuel runs out, the satellite is dead and needs replacing)
And if a single one goes wrong, the chances of it colliding with another are remarkably high, thus wiping out the whole lot in that orbit. (Well, risiking doing so...)
It's a joke. And of course since a given satellite is overhead for so little time, the swignalling is far more complex, requiring all the land stations to be more failure prone blah blah blah.
Sure, Inmarsat have bugger all bandwidth left, but at least you can get a signal from pretty much anywhere but the poles.
-----
Bankruptcy: Better technology through screwing the other guy!
"Get regulatory approval"? If I've got an army of birds in low earth orbit I DON'T NEED ANY FUCKING approval from every nation under the Sun. It's up to local oppressive governments to keep communications out of the hands of its slaves, not mine, bozo.
I think the possibility of global, untracable (FBI Suit, "Yeah, the call is coming from the eastern hemisphere") communications scared the crap out of our own (US) gov't much less other govt's. That's why this project was stopped.
EAT FLAMING DEATH MATHEMATIC SCUM! I HAVE DISCREDITED COMPLEX NUMEROLOGY! MUHAHAHAHA!!
Iridium going down the shitter is just another symptom of having too many idiot PHB's high up in corporate mgmt. How do i know this? Because... I'm there, in Schaumburg, right in the middle of 'em all. Luckily, I'm not a Motorola employee, and learned enough to decide that long-term, I'm staying away from MOT stock. Think Iridium is a fluke? There's a whole laundry list of shitty Motorola products that went down the drain... The Powerstack PowerPC server, the StarMax Mac clone, and others too numerous to mention... and it's only going to continue... Those satellites were designed with only a five, yes... FIVE year operating lifespan, and it's nearly over... Hehehehehe....
You're kidding.
You have to be.
right???
Once you have that working you set up a constellation where 64 different words represent various combination of bit sequences so you send several bits per word...
what Iridium was expecting. Their prices were insane, it was wayt too expensive to just make a phone call, how many people trek through the Himalayas and take a phone with them? Isn't the point of going out in the wilderness to get away from civilization? They should have user a smaller constellation of higher altitude satillites, similar to the US military MILSTAR satillites. With higher altitude they could have a longer lifetime (15-20+ years) and have a wider coverage area. The idea was sound in a way, but they really should have done alot of marketing in smaller developing nations where a decent telephony infrastructure doesn't exist but is needed. They could have also sold their services to airline companies that could benefit from a global communication system, that way their planes could more readily get accurate weather information. That would have made them more money than trying to sell to wealthy american travelers wanting to call home to check on their stock broker and maid.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
It would have been cheeper to develop ground cell stations in all major cities and remote highways and poopular tourist places around the world Surely building 5000 GSM towers at $50,000 each is cheeper. http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=IRID&d=t Stock at 3 1/16s, 52week high = 49$ Wow, i see a lot of suicidal investors now! Click on INSIDE, and see some of those execs selling at decent prices! Btw that old IRIDIUM game for C-64/Amiga was nice, anyone wanna make that guy port to Linux?
funny.. but there is no truth to that at all. Iridium used launch sites all over the world.. including former USSR, China, and the US.
The majority of the space vehicles were launched from the US.
The little Texas chipmaker just keeps on ticking . . . I have a lot of faith in this company's future success. The Mac is making a strong comeback, but still is quite competitive in terms of x86 Linux architecture.
Are they out there and do they work with Linux?
And how about some great compression, to deal with the 2400 bps speed.
George
so, Iridium's busted.. and Motorola continues to carry the torch for them... if Motorola's this "in" with Iridium, why didn't they just take over Iridium, and save them the disgrace of filing for bankruptcy?
Insert mind here.
I've been really captivated by this whole thing. Watching a company go down in a spectacular ball of flames is kind of neat.
:)
When I first heard about Iridium, I had a bad feeling. Guess I should have given the investors a clue.
Maybe asking people to pay exorbitant amounts for brain cancer wasn't such a good business model anyway.
I say they should ditch the satellites one by one over major US cities on New Years Eve for a truly spectacular fireworks display.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Iridium needs a cheap launch, so...
Motorola decides to launch in China, so...
China can't get their booster to work, so...
After heavy DNC contributions, the Vice President signs a waiver authorizing limited missile tech to China, so...
Iridium sats are launched, but...
China uses the same tech to create the "Long March", so...
they announce first-strike capability against the U.S., so...
Clinton does nothing, so...
now they can nuke us, and we did it all so that Iridium sats could launch, and now...
THEY'RE BANKRUPT?
That's fantastic. We've given our most probable major enemy first-strike capability just so the DNC can afford to re-elect Gore, and the company that paid everyone off can't even bother to stick around and provide decent service.
Aw, heck.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
Now there's a real outstanding debt... Reminds me of wizards in Discworld that always knew when they were going to die: 'they died happily drinking the last of their winecellar and incidentally owing quite large sums of money'
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
When you have stockholders, investing a couple billion dollars in a risky venture is quite hard to sneak past them. So spinning it off to another company and getting people to invest in it to spread the risk is a good idea. It was quite a cool idea, but I think it just got overtaken by the internet, GSM roaming (thats 1900 PCS for you US guys), ever cheapening international call rates, and the competition (GlobalStar and someone else?) nuked them. I think this was all discussed here last time it came up: 1/ the satellites are only good for 5 years and so they have to replace the first one in another year or two. 2/ the satellites don't have much data bandwidth 3/ its (still) damned expensive compared to picking up a prepaid phone for $100 and using that. Certainly the International Space Station wouldn't be built by a public company, and thats got a similar type of risk (lots of maintenance, potential for big explosions). Bruce
Does anyone know if they would have gone bankrupt on their own or did the whole "we must be able to listen in and know where you are so no play for you" govt force them to go bankrupt? It would be really embarrassing for our allegedly pro-business govt forced them to go under (especially as that law was borderline useless since the kidz will all encrypt one day anyway). You have to admit tho, sending 3zillion satellites into space is pretty ballsy :! Maybe they could sue the govt *ponder*?
-avi
If they end up going into bankruptcy somebody will get those sattelites for a song. It might be possible for some company to offer the service at a reasonable price if they don't have that huge debt to pay off.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I think the whole idea of the low orbit satellites for communications is a good idea, but they should have planned ahead for this sort of thing. They can't expect everyone to drop their current cell phones and pick up an iridium one (assuming you can even find one at this point). If I recall, they're supposed to have 288 satellites to be accessible anywhere on earth, and they don't have nearly that many right now. While it's a lot more expensive than cellular, most people will opt for the much cheaper option. I think they planned on being ready and in full swing by 2003 (without getting much in the way of revenues in), so I guess the question is... it's only 1999, what happened?
WRONG. iridium does sat to sat switching.
I was all ready to go online with linux.aq and now this happens! Nuts.
Yes, now that evolution never happened... r
The Long March rocket predates Iridium by quite a bit.
Obviously, geeks know nothing about business. Filing for bankruptcy does not mean you are going out of business. Iridium can never go out of business, too many companies and governments have too much tied up into it.
True enough. Anybody can build a big rocket. Guidance is the issue... and they didn't have that, until our future President, *shudder*, handed the guidance tech over.
Now they've got it. Iridium boosts fine... and so do MIRVs.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
This just goes to prove that great ideas and big corporate backers do not always work out. Keep that in mind the next time you invest in a company.
Awe, this bites what are the 10 people who have the service going to do?????????? I still can't believe 10-18 bucks a minute for this thing! -not a coward Napalm4u's account is gone?????
whoops i forgot to mention that i'm from Kansas and education there sucks so that's why i used Know instead of No
Damn, they're continuing .. I was hoping to buy a couple of them satellites for $20 on ebay or something ;-)
:-) Not to mention a Jaguar XP8
Hey can I borrow one of the Iridium credit-cards? they have $1.5bln debt, they won't notice if I add a couple $100K extra, I would like to buy some computer gear
oh well..
I had a buddy who worked for Motorola when the whole thing was dreamed up. It was called Iridium because the number of satellites was equal to the atomic number of Iridium. Cute huh?
Except to shave costs they cut the planned number of satellites. My friend checked his CRC and found that the number was equal to the atomic number of the element dysprocium. "Dysprocium" is Greek for "Unable to Talk" (I am not making this up).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As people have mentioned, the Operations and Maintanence on this constellation is going to cost quite a bit (to say the least). However, if you think about it, this is a system that the Department of Defense may want, and they'll get it for a song. Whether or not you like that...
Phones not working well indoors is by design.
Sure MOT got most of the Iridium money, but much of it was money spent buying parts or doing development, so all they get is a bunch of legacy code. And the experience of negotiating a few launch contracts.
2 year lifetime is something that I don't really buy; they're probably saying that to make sure they don't get sued if their satellites went down too fast. Of course, there are lots of things that can fail on satellites, so you can never be sure.
Those of you who hope that Teledesic will be nice, fast, sanely priced, and well designed, remember who's the prime contractor =)
Scan the news services, examine all the Iridium websites, etc.
hemisphere") communications scared the crap out of our own (US) gov'
Hard to trace, perhaps, but VERY easy to tap. Just point an antenna at every satellite and you've got 'em all. What signal goes up must come down - at least while all the handsets are on the planet's surface. Tapping regular cellular, meanwhle, needs a receiver in each cell of interest unless you can tap the network feeding the base stations.
And you might be able to get some location info from the satellites, too.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ever seen an Iridium ad? You probably have but don't remember. 3 pages of glitz and gloss but nary a mention of their product (which is cool but overpriced).
Think I'm exagerating? Do the math!
Gotta do what the political contributors tell us to do!
Who did their market research? Are there really 1 million people on the face of a planet that have so much fucking money that they don't know what to do with it all?
Iridium has been doomed now for nearly a year. It was only a matter of time.
Iridium was a flawed concept anyhow. First, all switching had to be done on the GROUND. Doh! Lots of ground stations.
Secondly, what kind of bandwidth did they offer? Atlease they could have offered the ability to have 128Kb/s. They had the chance. I talked to severel moto guys back when they were testing Iridium over South Africa. They said, Who in the world would want bandwidth??
The only one I have much hope for is Teledesic (Admittidly funded in part by BillG).. They will offer a T1 anywhere.
Let em burn. Dummies.
pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.