> There are only so many war zone reporters and mountain climbers to go around, though.

The U.S. Department of Defense is Iridium's largest customer by far, and kept them alive with a large cash infusion at one point (if memory serves).

Also, fun fact: iridium modems provide the only continuous data link for the U.S. South Pole station. There are 12 modems ganged together, used for e-mail and weather info transfer. Bandwidth: 28.8kbps. (the station also has several high-bandwidth uplinks, but the coverage windows for those are limited, and they have to compete with NASA/ISS for bandwidth).