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 .
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.
Exactly! I posted an example right above. I think we used something like 6 minutes total, but it was incredibly useful:
The weather turned nasty, we called the pilot that was picking us up and changed our rendezvous to a place that was easier for all of us to get to. This was much easier than slogging our way though a flooded mess.
There's also a decent rental market for these phones, so one doesn't have to shell out thousands of dollars--you can get one for $50-75/week + airtime, which is a fairly minor expense if you are already going somewhere so remote you need to be flown in/out.
Yeah, with rentals they really became affordable for people that are doing occasional trips to far-away places. Pure emergency use is better covered with a personal locator beacon, but as soon as you want to convey some information other than "SOS" you probably want one.
You really want both. PLBs will work continuously for days. But with so many false alarms SAR agencies want second verification. Which can be as simple as filing a travel plan and letting relatives know your hiking area. Or pop the plb and then call SAR on your sat phone to say yes this is not a false alarm.
> 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.
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).
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.
The idea that people would carry an Iridium phone constantly turned out to be pretty far-fetched (if nothing else, they're big and the audio quality is pretty lousy), but they have carved out a pretty decent niche catering to people who are traveling in remote areas.
My brother did some conservation work in really remote areas; I joined him for a little bit. They carried a sat phone, which was used for brief check-ins every few days ("We're fine. Will be moving down the river to site B this afternoon. Bye!") and to coordinate "operations" like receiving supplies or getting picked up by a bush pilot.
Edit: I vaguely recall some of the early marketing being aimed at Gordon Gekko-style businessmen who must always be reachable. I think this never panned of partly due to the cost and partly due to the fact that cell phones got much, much better, both in terms of features and coverage.
Who is the "user"? The story of how the product began development was:
Iridium began as a pet project of Motorola
executive Barry Bertinger and some engineers
in the mid-1980s after the former's wife
famously complained of not being able to
phone the US while on holiday in the Caribbean.
I didn't see that story in the article, but it's probably in the book. That and Iridium flares are the two most interesting things about Iridium, to me at least.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"This advanced [lash up] technology delivers a gross throughput equivalent to a home user with a 28.8 Kbps dial-up modem. The IMCS uses more than 13.5 million satellite airtime minutes each year."
Iridium coverage at the poles is EXCELLENT because the satellites all converge over the polar regions, being in orbital inclinations of something like 82 to 90 degrees. There are also a lot of unattended weather monitoring and science data M2M things in Antarctica that use Iridium embedded modems.
The DoD even spent a ton of money building their own Iridium gateway in Hawaii, which is linked to the other DoD teleports in Hawaii. A lot of military M2M stuff uses Iridium, not just voice. Blue force trackers, etc. The current corporate incarnation of Iridium that acquired the network from the original bankrupt entity would probably be doing OK even without the military, but it's certainly doing better thanks to all the NATO countries that use Iridium stuff.
Even without the military there is a decent sized worldwide market for low-data-rate text email and voice in literally any location on the planet. Iridium works in polar ocean regions with Inmarsat doesn't. It works in fun places like the middle of a desert in Chad or southern Libya. Globalstar was at one time Iridium's closest real competitor but it was a network architecture failure, even before their first generation of satellites developed severe reliability/failure problems. Until very recently Iridium's only real competition for true 'global' coverage was Inmarsat, and Inmarsat is based on geostationary satellites so it's problematic to use at high latitudes. Inmarsat also until very recently did not have a handheld phone product, an Iridium phone was small enough to put in a backpack or small Pelican case while an Inmarsat terminal was the size and weight of a giant 17" gaming laptop.
Beyond this, it's probably possible to snoop on the location of local targets with some unknown degree of accuracy, even if you can't decode their data payload.
If you have an SDR at hand and want to try it yourself, get the code from GitHub https://github.com/muccc/iridium-toolkit
Even with a simple WLan antenna you will get some reception outside (preferrably on a roof).
Iridium came out in the time when cellphones weren't quite yet ubiquitous, and the military saved them from bankruptcy. However, today the demand for their services is much higher because there is so much greater demand for mobile data services. There are 4.5 billion mobile phone users in the world, for example. And tons of companies have built out various systems and infrastructure that depend on mobile data. Enough of them need data links even in remote areas to justify the expense of using Iridium.
I use an inreach SE currently and these prices must be before my times. It's $25 annual activation fee. And the most basic plan is $10/month which I use for SAR. Also messages are 25cents.
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.
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.
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]
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.
48 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadCellular 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.
There's also a decent rental market for these phones, so one doesn't have to shell out thousands of dollars--you can get one for $50-75/week + airtime, which is a fairly minor expense if you are already going somewhere so remote you need to be flown in/out.
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.
My brother did some conservation work in really remote areas; I joined him for a little bit. They carried a sat phone, which was used for brief check-ins every few days ("We're fine. Will be moving down the river to site B this afternoon. Bye!") and to coordinate "operations" like receiving supplies or getting picked up by a bush pilot.
Edit: I vaguely recall some of the early marketing being aimed at Gordon Gekko-style businessmen who must always be reachable. I think this never panned of partly due to the cost and partly due to the fact that cell phones got much, much better, both in terms of features and coverage.
Who is the "user"? The story of how the product began development was:
I didn't see that story in the article, but it's probably in the book. That and Iridium flares are the two most interesting things about Iridium, to me at least.[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/down-to-earth-rea...
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...
Google invested $1B in SpaceX for this very purpose -- To launch on the order of 4,000 satellites to provide worldwide internet.
Compared to an SSB packet radio setup it isn't that bad.
Using the iPhone app the voice calls were surprisingly good. Like you could have a real conversation good, possibly less than 200ms.
If if you max that out continuously that's only 800MB/month.
CDMA and cellphones are amazing but only work in specific circumstances. HF packet radio is pretty incredible where you can reach.
[1] https://youtu.be/hcrBE5hkuRU
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"This advanced [lash up] technology delivers a gross throughput equivalent to a home user with a 28.8 Kbps dial-up modem. The IMCS uses more than 13.5 million satellite airtime minutes each year."
(See http://www.usap.gov/technology/contentHandler.cfm?id=1935 for the general picture of their telecom.)
multilink PPP over Iridium for polar regions: https://www.ittc.ku.edu/publications/documents/Mohammad2004_...
Even without the military there is a decent sized worldwide market for low-data-rate text email and voice in literally any location on the planet. Iridium works in polar ocean regions with Inmarsat doesn't. It works in fun places like the middle of a desert in Chad or southern Libya. Globalstar was at one time Iridium's closest real competitor but it was a network architecture failure, even before their first generation of satellites developed severe reliability/failure problems. Until very recently Iridium's only real competition for true 'global' coverage was Inmarsat, and Inmarsat is based on geostationary satellites so it's problematic to use at high latitudes. Inmarsat also until very recently did not have a handheld phone product, an Iridium phone was small enough to put in a backpack or small Pelican case while an Inmarsat terminal was the size and weight of a giant 17" gaming laptop.
Beyond this, it's probably possible to snoop on the location of local targets with some unknown degree of accuracy, even if you can't decode their data payload.
Here:
https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/system/attachme...
And here:
https://events.ccc.de/congress/2015/Fahrplan/system/event_at...
You just need a handful of local stations to get good coverage, but then it's very trivial.
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.
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.
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
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://canmua.net/world/the-fall-and-rise-of-iridium-882149....
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.