
The Fall and Rise of Iridium - utnick
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fall-and-rise-of-iridium-1464980784
======
walrus01
The fun thing about Iridium is that it's one of the few existing examples of
satellite-to-satellite backbone links in space. The satellites are in polar
orbits and talk to each other by directional point-to-point Ka band in space.
This means that the whole network architecture (the first generation of
satellites, not the ones imminently about to be launched for the new network)
can relay all of its traffic through just one or two earth stations (Hawaii
and Chandler, AZ).

This is why Iridium has kicked the ass of Globalstar, which was a bent pipe
repeater satellite arrangement and relied on dozens of earth stations
worldwide, also rendering it unable to provide service in polar regions and in
the middle of oceans.

The only other telecom satellites that form backbone/trunk links in space are
geostationary and military. The network architecture was WAY ahead of its time
considering the design was finalized in 1996-1998 or thereabouts.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Another really cool thing about Iridium is that they pioneered using mass
production to make satellites. Most satellites are basically hand built, the
way automobiles were back around the turn of the 20th century. Motorolla built
the original Iridium satellites on an assembly line, and were able to reduce
the per unit costs by orders of magnitude and bring down the time to build a
satellite dramatically (to about $5 million and less than a week per), despite
the satellites themselves being fairly advanced and full-featured.

~~~
walrus01
Even so, they were up to about a billion dollars in debt for satellites,
engineering services and launch services by the time the original Iridium
corporation went bankrupt around 2001... I'm not sure how much good their cost
savings did for them. It's not really that they pioneered mass-assembly of
satellites, but that there had never been a large low earth orbit network of
identical satellites before. The new Iridium satellites and anything else
built in quantities of 10+ will be built using a similar assembly line
fashion.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Sure, but with a fleet of a good fraction of 100 satellites, it's not going to
be cheap however you slice it, especially given the launch costs back then.
70-odd satellites in the initial constellation, 15 launches, that's a billion
in launch costs and over a third of a billion in satellite manufacturing
costs, aside from R&D. Nevertheless, they easily saved... at a minimum $3
billion and as much as maybe $7-10 billion by doing it the way they did. Which
was, I'll point out, a very revolutionary practice that has been widely
regarded by the industry as being such. If they hadn't done it that way they
wouldn't have been able to get off the ground at all, most likely.

Also of note, the launch market has changed for the better considerably since
then. Despite having the same constellation size for Iridium Next and slightly
larger satellites (by about 15%) they'll be able to get them deployed with
only 10 launches at a total cost of $490 million.

Of course, now the market has largely caught up with their vision so they're
doing a lot better financially.

~~~
walrus01
Iridium Next has a lot more revenue potential for them as well, with all sorts
of new products that can be developed with embedded Iridium modems (same
general way they sell the 9602 transceiver to manufacturing partners now).

The fact that you can do TCP/IP data over the first generation Iridium network
is actually kind of a minor miracle, the data rates are so low. Voice calls
have to fit in 2400 bps with a special codec. Data sessions used a lossless
compression system not very dissimilar from v42bis to squeeze up to 9600 baud
out of a 2400 bps connection... Well, at least if all you're transferring is a
plain text file, if it's content that's already compressed you literally see
0.2KB/second.

They're going after the revenue that Inmarsat enjoys from BGAN services,
Thuraya's revenue stream from BGAN-like L/S-band services, etc. Maritime and
aircraft of course. And military... and military and civilian UAVs... all
sorts of stuff. M2M stuff that has to work literally anywhere.

------
Animats
What saved Iridium were the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Suddenly DoD, other
US agencies, and various contractors and NGOs had lots of people in areas with
no functioning comm infrastructure. So the US Government put money into
Iridium and bought half the airtime.

Iridium is wiretappable. There's a Motorola patent on this, which shows how
channels can be split, transmitted over satellite to satellite links, and
copied to a monitoring ground station. But this is expensive; not all calls
can be recorded.

~~~
revelation
I think you are being overly optimistic on the "hard to wiretap".

Here:

[https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/system/attachme...](https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/system/attachments/2559/original/Iridium-
Talk-Komplett.pdf)

And here:

[https://events.ccc.de/congress/2015/Fahrplan/system/event_at...](https://events.ccc.de/congress/2015/Fahrplan/system/event_attachments/attachments/000/002/834/original/Iridium-
Talk-32c3-final.pdf)

You just need a handful of local stations to get good coverage, but then it's
very trivial.

~~~
Sec
If you have an SDR at hand and want to try it yourself, get the code from
GitHub [https://github.com/muccc/iridium-
toolkit](https://github.com/muccc/iridium-toolkit) Even with a simple WLan
antenna you will get some reception outside (preferrably on a roof).

------
yardie
As a user of one of their products, Iridium Go, I still find it amazing I can
place a phonecall in the middle of the Atlantic from my iPhone. My crew and I
would email and browse the web 1000 miles from the nearest tower.

~~~
ezequiel-garzon
Thanks for commenting on your experience as a user. Out of curiosity, must the
apps "Iridium Mail & Web" or "Iridium GO!" be launched in order to have
Internet access? I'm also confused because the official video [1] talks about
the former as providing "mobile web access on supported sites". Cheers.

[1] [https://youtu.be/hcrBE5hkuRU](https://youtu.be/hcrBE5hkuRU)

~~~
yardie
Yes and no. The built-in firewall effectively blocks pretty much everything
except what's whitelisted. So on the settings portal you choose the sites you
want to access and they will download a super compressed version for you.

Now to get non-whitelisted sites you can install Opera Mobile. The browser
that compresses sites for you. I should have done this before our
transatlantic but you live and learn.

Supported sites are basically weather sites. During our transatlantic I
basically used weather 4D and passageweather.

Now to your first question you need the Iridium Go app to initiate the
connection. Once online any wifi connected device may use it.

------
PhantomGremlin
For average people, the best part of the satellite constellation is the
regular occurrence of Iridium flares. Worth seeing, at least a few times:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare#Iridium_flares](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare#Iridium_flares)

------
ledude
I haven't read Eccentric Orbits yet but a few years ago Airspace Mag did a
really nice piece on Iridium that has some really good backstory on the
company and its tech: [http://www.airspacemag.com/space/the-rise-and-fall-and-
rise-...](http://www.airspacemag.com/space/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-
iridium-5615034/?no-ist)

------
Reese1379
Here's a link not behind a paywall:

[http://canmua.net/world/the-fall-and-rise-of-
iridium-882149....](http://canmua.net/world/the-fall-and-rise-of-
iridium-882149.html)

------
wstrange
The Delorme Inreach is on the Iridium band and is very popular with back
country enthusiasts.

It's a little pricey (16 CDN / month, if you _dont_ use it at all, and about a
buck a message if you do) -but for peace of mind they are fantastic.

~~~
ChristinaM
Cruising sailors love in Inreach too (at least in the Caribbean). It's great
to be able to essentially text people at home with passage reports or just to
keep up when you keep switching countries & don't want to constantly be buying
new SIM cards (that don't work in lots of nice areas).

I have a full-on Iridium sat phone. I've only made 2 calls on it. Mostly it it
gets used to download weather forecasts and text people back home. Weather
option on the Inreach are getting better though they're a long way from good
enough for offshore use. There seems to be enough demand that they'll get
there though.

------
cft
I wonder if one could actually deploy a cheap satellite phone and data service
now for the areas of bad coverage or to avoid international roaming, using a
mesh of redundant and disposable microsatellites, launched via SpaceX? Or is
someone already building this now?

~~~
dukoid
Not sure about satellites. Facebook and Google are experimenting with solar-
powered planes and balloons for this purpose. One problem with satellites is
that you can't make them stay at the same spot, except for geostationary orbit
above the equator, which is quite far away.

~~~
brohee
Handover is a solved problem, so not that much of an issue.

The article skims on some technical limitation tho, IIRC the number of
simultaneous calls that could happen simultaneously in the continental US was
in the low thousands, dunno if it improved since launch but that was
definitely not mass market, even if the terminals got a lot cheaper...

------
kilroy123
I still think it's a very cool product with a real need by a lot of people.
Hell, even I have always wanted one!

A couple problems. First they were way ahead of their time. Secondly, the
barrier to entry for space was/is too much.

I think we are on the cusp of changing this dramatically. With SpaceX forcing
launch prices down. Micro-satellites becoming a real thing. Plus a possible
new company; Vector Space Systems. [1]

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/26/vector-space-systems-
aims-t...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/26/vector-space-systems-aims-to-
launch-satellites-by-the-hundreds/)

------
jtchang
The one thing about wireless technology is that we still have a long way to
go. On the one hand it is freaking amazing that we have a tiny device in our
pocket that can pretty much pull down the world's information. On the other
hand it still doesn't work everywhere.

Think about all the times cell service cuts out or isn't seamless: subways,
airplanes, boats, basements, etc. Though I admit 100% coverage over every damn
square inch of the planet is kind of crazy.

------
louprado
An early Iridium presentation included an artistic rendition of a solar
powered Iridium-based phone booth in the middle of a jungle -- a dark jungle
with a halo of light above the phone booth. Peasants were walking by on a
trail near the phone booth carrying baskets on their heads. Elsewhere in the
presentation they mentioned a target price of $3 a minute.

The above was in a recruitment presentation for engineering NCGs. I recall a
sinking feeling that I would one day leave academia and work on projects with
absurd marketing visions.

Edit: typos

------
vu3mmg
I think iridium is a classical case where product was developed with out
trying to understand 'what user needs'.For example (@1998) iridium had a cost
of $3000 per handset with talk time of > $5/minute.Also cellular phone was a
strong substitute for iridium. I think they have done a gross under estimate
of potential target market. Since iridium needed line of site for
communication had difficulty in working inside buildings , I am wondering who
is there actual target customer .Number of national banks who invested in
iridium lost their money .

~~~
chrisseaton
I think you've grossly underestimated the use cases and budgets of the users.

Cellular phones aren't a substitute, because satellite phones are for
precisely where there is no cellular coverage, like less developed countries,
remote terrain, and war zones.

Nobody expects people in the street to buy them. I would image most customers
are military, other governmental and NGOs, maybe some private companies
working in remote places, and a few people with private yachts or who like
hiking in very remote places.

For all those customers and use cases, the price for the handset and cost per
minute is reasonable. Mainly because there's no substitute, but also because
these users are big spenders anyway.

And it doesn't matter that they don't work in buildings, because of course
you're normally using these in places without any buildings.

~~~
aab0
> I think you've grossly underestimated the use cases and budgets of the
> users.

I think the point of OP, and of the other magazine article linked in the
comments, is that he hasn't 'grossly underestimated' it in the least bit: yes,
you can pay peanuts for Iridium and run an already built Iridium network on
those use-cases like the military and occasional people going to war zones and
NGOs and hikers, and make the business work that way. But you cannot build one
costing billions of dollars based on those use-cases, which is why _Iridium
went bankrupt in the first place_ \- their business plan was based on covering
way more than lost hikers and Afghanistan, it was based on the delusional
ideas that businessmen in Paris would pay for it. This was delusional, so
Iridium went bankrupt, defaulted on its debts, cost its original investors
fortunes, and had to be rescued out of bankruptcy for $25m and refocused on
the use-cases which actually did work.

~~~
roywiggins
I've read arguments that the dot-com boom and bust caused a huge amount of
internet infrastructure to be built out- which were still available for the
post-crash companies to use for cheap, because all the capital costs had been
paid for already (by the investors who lost everything in the crash).

~~~
aab0
Google certainly benefited a ton from all the 'dark fiber' and the glut of
bandwidth after the crash. Probably didn't make much of a long-term difference
because it didn't solve the last-mile problem to consumers. ('We now have free
terabyte/s bandwidth in between our datacenters!' 'Great. But all our
customers are still connecting over 1mb/s DSLs. What do we do with it all?')
And other countries which didn't build out so much have still done well in
getting Internet connectivity done.

