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by walrus01·10y ago·view on hn ↗
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.

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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.