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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

Slow race. Motorola tried this once already and failed with the Iridium Constellation in the 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...

The venture went bankrupt and Motorola was actually on the verge of burning them up in the atmosphere when the Pentagon stepped in: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=119255

Another interesting thing about the Iridium Constellation is that the satellites have an unusual arrangement of large, flat antennae. This, along with detailed data about their position and orientation means that they create very predictable flares of reflected sunlight that are quite visible from Earth. You can usually a fairly bright flare every couple days:

http://heavens-above.com/IridiumFlares.aspx

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Oh, right, it was tried before.

Hey, remember the Newton? It's kind of a shame we'll never see an improvement on tablet computers since that failure proved it wasn't a viable idea.

The costs of building and launching small satellites has dropped significantly since the 90s. People are also traveling more and demanding more connectivity, so it seems that Iridium may have just been a bit to early to the game.

Early, or late. One of Iridium's problems was that by the time they actually became operational, a huge chunk of their potential customer base had been eaten up by terrestrial cellular phones. The number of people who needed something more than a cell phone was a lot smaller in 1998 than it was in 1987.

Iridium service was also unbelievably expensive and not all that useful. (For that matter, still is.) If you had a choice between Iridium and a cell phone, the cell phone won every time. Iridium was a product for those with no other choice. If they had come in earlier, they might have had enough people with no other choice to make it. Later, and they might have been able to offer something that could actually compete with terrestrial services. As it was, their timing ended up being really bad.

Interestingly, they're still popular with some very adventurous groups, e.g. Round-the-world sailors, motorcyclists going through remote locations, climbers and hikers in remote places / foreign countries, etc.

Very useful if it's the only thing that will work.

Exactly. For some cases it's an amazing service. It just wasn't enough to sustain a company that had to spend $5 billion up front to get things started. Once that got discharged in bankruptcy, it managed to do OK.

I've used Iridium sat phones in Iraq, and am currently prepping for deployment to Antarctica, where we'll have Iridium phones as backup to a satellite data link.

Slow being the operative word.

Iridium failed at the Internet partly due to being slow as molasses. The data rate is 2400 bits per second.

Iridium wasn't intended for internet -- it was intended for voice only. And by the time they got enough birds in the air, most areas were covered by at least one voice provider, so the only potential market was people that traveled frequently to remote areas. Not to mention that you could never have a handset that fit in your pocket.

Now the way I thought Iridium should have been constructed, is to have the uplink be a portable micro cell unit, that regular phones could roam to. That way you would only need one Iridium phone, maybe located outside, and others could use their existing phones to connect to it.

FWIW this is kind of what they do on e.g. racing sailboats offshore; a central uplink hooks into the satellites and distributes internet onboard via wifi. It's slow and expensive, but let's you do things like pull weather reports from the middle of the Atlantic, post your progress back to race control and your family / friends, etc.

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