| Type | Public company |
|---|---|
| Traded as | NASDAQ: IRDM |
| Industry | Satellite Telecommunication |
| Founded | 2001 |
| Headquarters | McLean, VA, United States |
| Area served | Global |
| Key people | Matt Desch (CEO), Tom Fitzpatrick, Liz DeCastro |
| Products | Satellite communications equipment |
| Services | Satellite voice and data services |
| Website | iridium.com |
Iridium Communications Inc. (formerly Iridium Satellite LLC) is a company, based in McLean, VA, United States which operates the Iridium satellite constellation, a system of 66 active satellites used for worldwide voice and data communication from hand-held satellite phones and other transceiver units. The Iridium network is unique in that it covers the whole Earth, including poles, oceans and airways. The company derives its name from the chemical element iridium. The number of satellites projected in the early stages of planning was 77, the atomic number of iridium, evoking the metaphor of 77 electrons orbiting the nucleus.
The satellites are frequently visible in the night sky as satellite flares, a phenomenon typically observed as short-lived bright flashes of light.
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Iridium SSC, Iridium communications service was launched on November 1, 1998. The first Iridium call was made by then-Vice President of the United States Al Gore.[1] Motorola provided the technology and major financial backing.[2] The logo of the company was designed by Landor Associates, and represents the Big Dipper.[3] In 2008, as part of a rebranding campaign the word mark would be de-capitalized.
The founding company went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy nine months later, on August 13, 1999.[4] The handsets could not operate as promoted until the entire constellation of satellites were in place, requiring a massive initial capital cost running into the billions of dollars.[5] The increased coverage of terrestrial cellular networks, e.g., GSM, and the rise of roaming agreements between cellular providers proved to be fierce competition. The cost of service was prohibitive for many users, reception indoors was difficult and the bulkiness and expense of the hand held devices when compared to terrestrial cellular mobile phones discouraged adoption among potential users.[4]
Mismanagement is another major factor cited in the original program's failure. In 1999, CNN writer David Rohde detailed how he applied for Iridium service and was sent information kits, but was never contacted by a sales representative. He encountered programming problems on Iridium's Web site, and a "run-around" from the company's representatives.[6] After Iridium filed bankruptcy, it cited "difficulty gaining subscribers".[7]
The initial commercial failure of Iridium had a dampening effect on other proposed commercial satellite constellation projects, including Teledesic. Other schemes (Orbcomm, ICO Global Communications, and Globalstar) followed Iridium into bankruptcy protection, while a number of other proposed schemes were never constructed.[4]
At one stage there was a threat that the Iridium satellites would have to be de-orbited; however, they remained in orbit and operational.[8][9] Their service was restarted in 2001 by the newly founded Iridium Satellite LLC, which was owned by a group of private investors. Although the satellites and other assets and technology behind Iridium were estimated to have cost on the order of US$6 billion, the investors bought the firm for about US$25 million.[5]
On February 10, 2009, Iridium 33 collided with a defunct Russian satellite, Kosmos 2251, 800 km over Siberia.[10] A pair of large debris clouds was created.[11]
Iridium Satellite LLC merged with a special purpose acquisition company (GHQ) created by the investment bank Greenhill & Co. (NYSE: GHL) in September, 2009 to create Iridium Communications, Inc. The public company trades on NASDAQ under the symbol "IRDM". The company has approximately 447,000 subscribers as of the end of March, 2011 (compared to 320,000 in December, 2008). Revenue for the full year 2010 was US $348.2 million with Operational EBITDA of US $158.9 million.[12]
The system is being used extensively by the U.S. Department of Defense through the DoD gateway in Hawaii.[13] The DoD made up 23% of Iridium's revenues in 2010. An investigation was begun into the DoD contract after a protest by Globalstar, to the U.S. General Accounting Office that no tender was provided. The investigation was suspended at the request of the Department of Defense, who cited national security reasons.[14]
The commercial gateway in Tempe, Arizona, provides voice, data, and paging services for commercial customers on a global basis. Typical customers include maritime, aviation, government, the petroleum industry, scientists, and frequent world travelers.
Iridium satellites are now an essential component of communications with remote science camps, especially the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. As of December 2006, an array of twelve Iridium modems was put online, providing continuous data services to the station for the first time. Total bandwidth is 28.8 kbit/s.[15]
Iridium is a founding member of the Hosted Payload Alliance (HPA). The HPA is a satellite industry alliance formed to increase awareness of the benefits of hosted government payloads on commercial satellites. Membership in the HPA is open to satellite operators, satellite manufacturers, system integrators and other interested parties.[16]
The Iridium system requires 66 active satellites in orbit to complete its constellation and spare satellites are kept in-orbit to serve in case of failure. The satellites are in six polar low Earth orbital planes at a height of approximately 485 miles (780 km). Satellites communicate with neighboring satellites via Ka band intersatellite links to relay communications to and from ground stations. Most of these satellites were launched in the late 1990s before the company went through bankruptcy. Since the bankruptcy, only seven additional satellites have been launched but an updated constellation of 66 satellites is currently being developed and is planned for launch in 2015-2017 on SpaceX Falcon 9 Launch Vehicles from Vandenberg AFB Space Launch Complex 3 in California.[17]
The former Iridium provided phones from two vendors, Kyocera and Motorola. The Motorola 9500 phone is a design from the first commercial phase of Iridium, whereas the 9555 model is the current version of the handset and was released in October 2008.[18] Until the release of the 9555 the 9505A was the sole handset sold by the company — a functionally identical clone of the Motorola 9505 with some slightly different components.[19]
Kyocera phone models SS-66K and SD-66K are no longer in production but still available in the second-hand and surplus market. The SD-66K phone is a small 900 MHz GSM phone that fitted in a cradle (KI-G100) that included a large antenna and facilitated connection to the Iridium network.[20] The SS-66K is a self contained phone, but featured a rather unusual ball antenna.
All handsets can receive SMS, but only the 9505, 9505A, 9555 and those based on the 9522 can send them.
Two pagers were made for the Iridium network — the Motorola 9501 and Kyocera SP-66K.[21] These are one-way devices that could receive messages delivered in the form of SMS.
Several other Iridium-based telephones exist, such as payphones, bag phones, car phones and equipment intended for installation on ships and aircraft. A handset made by NAL research combined with a 9522 transceiver is used for some of these products. The DPL handset provides a user interface nearly identical to that of the 9505 series phones.[22]
These can be used for data-logging applications in remote areas, now a common practical use for Iridium's services. Some types of buoys, such as those used for the tsunami warning system, use Iridium satellites to communicate with their base. The remote device is programmed to call or send SBD (Short burst data, see below) messages to the base at specified intervals, or it can be set to accept calls in order for it to offload its collected data. Most of these units can be connected to a handset and used as a fixed telephone.
The following transceivers have been released over the years:
These devices support only SBD and do not use a SIM card.
Quake Global designed the 9602 for use on the Iridium Satellite Network. This tiny two-way transceiver is used in applications for the rapidly growing M2M market, including remote asset tracking and monitoring solutions
Removable Subscriber Identity Modules (SIMs) are used in Iridium phones, much like those used for GSM. Prepaid SIM cards are usually green while post-paid cards are red.
Iridium OpenPort® is a broadband satellite voice and data communications system for maritime vessels. The system is used for crew calling and e-mail services on sea vessels such as merchant fleets, government and navy vessels, fishing fleets and personal yachts. Iridium’s Global Service Program provides shipboard technical support to Iridium OpenPort customers.[25]
Calls to Iridium phones are expensive, costing several dollars a minute. It is possible to call with charges reversed by first dialing a number in Arizona; the call is charged to the receiver at the standard rate for satellite to landline calls, but the caller only pays for the call to Arizona.[26]
Since Iridium will not sell prepaid cards or even its subscription call service directly, it is hard to obtain the exact price of making a call. There are numerous distributors that will activate Iridium phones and sell pre-paid vouchers and SIM cards.
The Iridium system deals with "minutes", which are subdivided into several much smaller "units". These minutes are the "basic rate" to landlines and ordinary mobile phones around the world. For a 500 minute annual plan the cost of the "basic rates" fluctuates around US$1.25 per minute, depending on the distributor. There are also regional plans that offer slightly cheaper rates than the normal, but these minutes can only be used in a specified geographic location (such as Africa, North America, Canada or Alaska).
Iridium and other satellite phones may be identifiable to the listener by the "clipping" effect of the data compression and the latency (time delay) due to the electronic equipment used and the distances the signal must travel. The voice codec used is called Advanced Multi-Band Excitation.
Iridium operates at only 2.2 to 3.8 kbit/s, which requires very aggressive voice compression and decompression algorithms.[27] Latency for data connections is around 1800 ms round-trip, using small packets.[28]
Despite the bandwidth limitations, transparent TCP/IP is supported. Iridium claims data rates up to 10 kilobits per second for their "direct Internet" service which utilizes v.42bis compression over a PPP dialup connection to Iridium's Arizona gateway. Actual data rates remain at 2300 to 2400 bit/s for any compressed data such as a JPG image or ZIP file, but plain text or HTML may transfer "up to" 10 kbit/s. Iridium 9500, 9505 and 9505A phones can be connected to computers using an RS-232 connection, as can the 9522A transceiver module. The 9555 phone connects to computers with a standard USB cable, using an internal USB to serial bridge chip and Windows drivers to emulate a serial COM port for compatibility with standard PPP clients.
Prepaid SIM cards are available from a variety of different outlets and sometimes appear on auction sites such as eBay. Their values range from 50 to 5,000 minutes; the 50 minute cards have no validity and the 75 minute vouchers are valid for only a month, but the 5,000 minute cards stay valid for two years. Since Iridium charges quite a bit for merely accessing their network without making calls it is possible to extend the validity of such an account by a month for around US$45. It is also possible to refill such an account without purchasing a new SIM card.
The 500 minute card is the most common one, which remains valid for one year and can usually be bought for US$600 to $750, while the 75 minute card can cost up to US$175 and the 5,000 minute card costs around US$4,000.
There is a basic "Emergency" plan for around US$30 to US$40 per month that offers no minutes at all with calls charged at around US$1.39 per minute, and also numerous plans with included minutes. For the more expensive plans (around US$250 per month) the per-minute price dips slightly below US$1.
Iridium controls the virtual country codes +8816 and +8817, part of the 881 range designated by the ITU for the Global Mobile Satellite System. Each subscriber is given an 8-digit number prefixed by one of these country codes. However many regional telephone service operators have no interconnect agreement with Iridium or other satellite networks and users on these networks need to call reversed charge to a U.S.-based number.
Since spring 2007, postpaid Iridium subscribers have an option to associate their Iridium numbers with a direct U.S.-based number (the so-called +1 Access service).[26]
The one-way paging service is still operational, despite the pagers no longer being in production for many years now. Messages are delivered to pre-selected "MDAs" which cover a certain geographic area. Three of these MDAs may be selected on a web-based portal or updated automatically if the paging service is bound to an Iridium phone. Each country has its own MDA based on its country code; some of the larger countries are divided into several MDAs, while separate MDAs exist for sections of ocean and common aeronautic routes. This service costs around US$70 per month with a limited number of messages allowed, or US$140 for an unlimited number of inbound messages.
Pagers are assigned with telephone numbers in area code 480 and can also be contacted using email, SMS and the web-based interface used to send messages to Iridium phones.[29]
Special modems such as the 9522A and Quake Q9612 can be used for sending and receiving short data bursts, less than 2 kilobytes at a time. This service is often used for asset tracking and remote monitoring. Messages are converted to be delivered in email format or over HTTP to a preconfigured address; the mobile unit does not include a destination address when sending a SBD message. A crude positioning report is also included in each message sent.[30] SBD messages take from 6 to 22 seconds to send or receive.[28]
In July 2011 The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a ruling that approves the use of Iridium for Future Air Navigation System (FANS) data links, enabling satellite data links with air traffic control (ATC) for aircraft flying in the FANS environment including areas not served by Inmarsat (above or below 70 Degrees Latitude) which includes Polar routes.[31]
Communication between satellites and handsets is done using a TDMA and FDMA based system using L-band spectrum between 1616 and 1626.5 MHz.[32] Iridium exclusively controls 7.775 MHz of this and shares a further 0.95 MHz. In 1999 Iridium agreed to timeshare a portion of spectrum, allowing radio astronomers to observe hydroxyl emissions; the amount of shared spectrum was recently reduced from 2.625 MHz.[33][34]
The type of modulation used is normally DE-QPSK, although DE-BPSK is used on the uplink (mobile to satellite) for acquisition and synchronization.[35] Each time slot is 8.28 ms long and sits in a 90 ms frame. Within each FDMA channel there are four TDMA time slots in each direction.[36] The TDMA frame starts off with a 20.32 ms period used for simplex messaging to devices such as pagers and to alert Iridium phones of an incoming call, followed by the four upstream slots and four downstream slots. This technique is known as time division multiplexing. Small guard periods are used between time slots. Regardless of the modulation method being used, communication between mobile units and satellites is performed at 25 kilobaud.
Channels are spaced at 41.666 kHz and each channel occupies a bandwidth of 31.5 kHz; this allows space for Doppler shifts.[32]
The Iridium system uses three different handoff types. As a satellite travels over the horizon, calls are handed to adjacent spot-beams; this occurs approximately every fifty seconds. A satellite only stays in view for seven minutes at the equator.[37] When the satellite disappears from view, an attempt is made to hand the call to another satellite. If no other satellite is in view, the connection is dropped. This may occur when the signal from either satellite is blocked by an obstacle. When successful, the inter-satellite handoff may be noticeable by a quarter-second interruption.[36]
The satellites are also able to transfer mobile units to different channels and time slots within the same spot beam.
Iridium routes phone calls through space. In addition to communicating with the satellite phones in its footprint, each satellite in the constellation also maintains contact with two to four adjacent satellites, and routes data between them, to effectively create a large mesh network. There are four earth stations which link to the network through the satellites visible to them. The space-based backhaul routes outgoing phone call packets through space to one of the earth station downlinks ("feeder links"). Station-to-station calls from one satellite phone to another can be routed directly through space without going through an earth station. As satellites leave the area of an earth station, the routing tables are updated and packets headed for the earth station are forwarded to the next satellite just coming into view of the earth station. Communication between satellites and earth stations is at 20 and 30 GHz.[38]
Gateways are located in
The pre-bankruptcy corporate incarnation of Iridium built eleven gateways, many of which have since been closed.[40] Gateways have also been built in Pune (India), Beijing (People's Republic of China), Moscow (Russia), Nagano (Japan), Seoul (South Korea), Taipei (Taiwan), Jeddah (Saudia Arabia) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). The company is seeking to reactivate gateways in Russia, and China to comply with national laws in those countries.
Like other satellite networks, Iridium terminals need open line-of-sight to open sky in order to function. For instance, units will not work consistently indoors, or under forest cover. Iridium does have a very powerful paging channel that can ring the phone indoors, but the customer may have to walk outdoors to take the call.
There is a Web/e-mail to SMS gateway which enables messages to be sent from the Internet or an e-mail account to Iridium handsets for free. There is also a voice mail service.
Iridium generally does not have roaming agreements with terrestrial/cellular operators. Telstra in Australia allows postpay GSM subscribers to use their SIM card. However, global roaming has to be activated and both incoming and outgoing calls are charged to this account, and the call rate is around US$4 per minute; the incoming calls are via the GSM phone number of the account, with country code, etc., prefixed. In order to use the network, it is necessary to have not only appropriate equipment, such as a handset or the optional cellular cassette for the Motorola 9505 phone, but also a pay-as-you-go or contract Iridium SIM card.
Without an extra Global navigation satellite system, receiver tracking is difficult, but not impossible, as the position of a mobile unit can be determined using a Doppler shift calculation from the satellite. These readings however can be inaccurate with errors in the tens of kilometers.[30] Even without using Doppler shifts, a rough indication of a unit's position can be found by checking the location of the spot-beam being used and the mobile unit's timing advance.
The position readings can be extracted from some transceiver units and the 9505A handset using the -MSGEO AT command.[41] In the past, Iridium has used this method of tracking to block service to U.S. embargoed countries, such as North Korea and other politically unpopular regions, such as Northern Sri Lanka. It is also used to stop geographically bounded plans from being used outside the designated area.
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