May 8, 2000
Iridium: A Technology Ahead of Its Time?
Tidbit Archive
| At one minute before midnight Friday, March 17, 2000, Iridium LLC
terminated its commercial telecommunications satellite service and began
liquidating its assets. The company had invested $5 billion in its
system, whose 88 low earth orbit satellites allowed users with a special
mobile phone to make and receive calls from anyplace on earth. In
the end, however, it was only able to attract about 55,000 subscribers
and could not even generate enough revenue to pay the interest on its start-up
costs. Although it took 12 years to design and build, the Iridium
system provided only 487 days of service before shutting down. It
was one of the most ambitious large-scale commercial uses of space, and
it became one of the most spectacular technological failures of recent
years.
What went wrong? Some find it hard to understand; others think Iridium's problems were obvious. The New York Times summed up the two views this way in an April 11, 2000, article: "Looking back, no one can make sense of it. Wall Street loved Iridium; there were supposed to be 1.6 million subscribers this year, and 27 million by 2007. Sure, there were bulky handsets, technical glitches and a poor marketing effort, analysts say, but how could they have been this wrong? "Easy, others say. 'Everyone in the industry has looked at Iridium as the pioneers of satellite phone service,' said Rikki Lee, editor of Wireless Week. 'And when they couldn't find anyone to pay $3,000 for a phone and $7 a minute for service, it was like -- duh! There aren't all that many people who track up to the North Pole.'" |
Links:Question of the day: What is the meaning of "Iridium" and why did the company choose that name? Click here for the answer.
The Iridium LLC global site, with links to country sites worldwide (while it lasts).
Lloyd's Satellite Constellations overview of Iridium. A comprehensive view of the Iridium system with links to almost anything you might want to know about it, with lots of technical and nontechnical information.
Article on the demise of Iridium in the online magazine, Feed, by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling.
Another Iridium post-mortem, this one from Wired News, March 18, 2000.
1998 Sky and Telescope article on Iridium flares -- bright reflections of the sun from Iridium's solar panels easily visible to observers on the ground with the unaided eye.
Photos of Iridium flares, including some animated GIFs, by Uwe Reimann.
Apparently, you can still buy or rent Iridium phones. A Kyocera model is advertised on this page from Outfitter Satellite, Inc., for $995. They might become collectors' items.
Iridium's loss is radio astronomy's gain. The system had interfered with faint signals from celestial objects, as described in this March 24 Science article. (Note: The full text of this article is available only to Science Online subscribers, but a summary is available free to anyone with registration).
Report on the Teledesic Network, a commercial global satellite network similar in some ways to Iridium but intended to serve stationary users with broadband access, from Sharjil Hasan and Waheed Qureshi at Virginia Tech (1997).
The Iridium, a New York jazz club.
