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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how much of a gamechanger it will be to only be able to send SMS, and probably at a fairly high price point.

It's perhaps a big deal if you're a Yak farmer in remote Sibera and don't normally have any kind of coverage at all, but most people have some sort of cell coverage that provides at least SMS.

The comment that the bulky handset killed Iridium is only part of the picture. The bigger issue is that terrestrial cell antennas went up faster than Motorola expected, and by the time the system was online its primary use case had already largely vanished, especially among the kind of people who could afford the extremely high fees for the service. In the end the market niche closed down to government people in extremely remote locations who don't already have some sort of satellite connection.

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They're not limited to SMS; that's just the minimum viable product. They can do voice and data as well with the same technology. It also should be a lot easier and cheaper for Lynk to deploy than it was for Iridium, since launch costs have gone down significantly (while reliability is higher) and they use extremely small, cheap satellites (at least initially). They are planning on providing a fill-in-the-gaps service and are partnering with existing terrestrial service providers... Providers, at least with the next-generation version, won't have to provide cell towers (in places where there isn't otherwise enough demand to justify the large installation and upkeep costs) purely for gaining complete coverage. This is the sort of thing Iridium was never capable of.

It should be pointed out that Iridium (post-bankruptcy) became profitable and has recently finished launching their entire second-generation constellation (on Falcon 9). Their subscriber base continues to grow.

I'm not so sure. One of the reasons cell phones work at all is that they are relatively close to the antenna. This service requires to antennas to be at least 100 miles away and doesn't have any provision to improve the gain on the client side. SMS may be roughly the limit of what they can provide in the available bandwidth. The inverse square law is a harsh mistress.

There's always the option of increased gain on the serving side as well (both transmitting and receiving). 5G and related technologies allow beam steering which may improve gain (and selectivity) on the client side, and it's possible Apple may be working this angle on their side for whatever they're working on.

In sparsely populated areas where the service could be valuable, I think they can get away with a lot more (as far as frequency usage) than they could for mobile in dense areas. So I think it could indeed be useful.

It will not work. Their use case is low data rate applications. It's one of those case where you pick 2 among high number of users, high bandwidth, and low gain user terminals.

The full picture of what killed Iridium is written up in great detail in "Eccentric Orbits". I'm only part of the way through the book, but lots of interesting stuff in there so far.

https://www.amazon.com/Eccentric-Orbits-Iridium-John-Bloom/d...

I don't think it's going to be a fairly high price point. Satellites are becoming commodities, Space X drove the price of launching down, and with the current technologies a small computer can process a lot, especially if you don't have to care about heat dissipation. Quite the contrary, you don't need to construct many towers in cities to get coverage, with all the legal burdens that implies and all the maintenance it requires. You will cover a much broader space, so your potential customer base is bigger for the investment, and you can even cover places that would have not been before. In fact, you can even have better signal for moving people like in trains, cars or... boats and planes !

Of course this is all speculations, but it has a lot of potential.

> The comment that the bulky handset killed Iridium is only part of the picture. The bigger issue is that terrestrial cell antennas went up faster than Motorola expected

A large percentage of those terrestrial base stations were built and sold by Motorola; they did pretty well overall. During that period of time, Motorola had low base station market share in the US and Europe - almost all of their business was in the locations that Iridium was built to serve.

The experience in designing, building and maintaining a large array of satellites (in Arizona, I think) most likely paid for itself in government contracts many times over.

Satellite beacons using the Iridium network are getting more popular with outdoor recreationists. The inReach https://explore.garmin.com/en-US/inreach/ works incredibly well, well worth the money if you do harder trips in the backcountry.

Right. And now you'll be able to do the same thing with just a service add-on. All of a sudden, your potential service base is huge, literally billions of devices.

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