Iridium satellite constellation

Iridium Satellite

The Iridium satellite constellation is a large group of satellites providing voice and data coverage to satellite phones, pagers and integrated transceivers over Earth's entire surface. Iridium Communications Inc. owns and operates the constellation and sells equipment and access to its services. The founding company went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy nine months later, on August 13, 1999.[1]

The constellation operates 66 active satellites in orbit to complete its constellation and additional spare satellites are kept in-orbit to serve in case of failure [2]. Satellites are in low Earth orbit at a height of approximately 485 mi (781 km) and the orbital velocity of the satellites is approximately 17,000 mph (27,000 km/h). Satellites communicate with neighboring satellites via Ka band [3] inter-satellite links. The satellites orbit from pole to pole with an orbit of roughly 100 minutes. This design means that there is excellent satellite visibility and service coverage at the North and South poles, where there are few customers. The cellular look down antenna has 48 spot beams arranged as 16 beams in three sectors. The four inter-satellite cross links on each satellite operate at 10 Mbit/s. Each satellite can support up to 1100 concurrent phone calls and weighs about 1,500 lb (680 kg).

Mistakes

Reasons for Iridium’s Collapse Cellular build-out dramatically reduced the target market’s need for Iridium’s service.  Iridium knew its phones would be too large and too expensive to compete with cellular service, forcing the company to play in areas where cellular was unavailable.

With this constraint in mind, Iridium sought a target market by focusing on international business executives who frequently traveled to remote areas where cellular phone service was not available. However, a number of mistakes leaded to the bankruptcy.


Use of stand-alone network in space: A call from an originating handset accesses the network at the nearest satellite, travels through space from satellite to satellite before beaming down to its destination on Earth. Unsurprisingly, all that technology came at a stiff price. Moreover, the lack of broadband data capabilities was another negative aspect of this decissio


Heavy handsets: The second issue was that the Iridium handsets were clunky, weighed about 1lb, and harkened back to Motorola's infamous brick phones, common a decade ago.

Small market: Despite spending more than 60M international marketing campaign, Iridium had managed to attract less than 20,000 customers.

Management issues: Though lots of new products fail to match early expectations, few, it seems, have failed with such an international bang. Insiders say Iridium's internal structure proved too cumbersome.  
Sales management: As the target group is the business people that traveling in remote areas where the don't have phone coverage, it seems that the sales department was non-existent. 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 website, and a "run-around" from the company's representatives [4]. You can't expect this type of support from a company that targets the managers of big companies that travel around the world.

Reborn

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]. The system is being used extensively by the U.S. Department of Defense through the DoD gateway in Hawaii.

Despite the big failures [5,6], the concept of Iridium satellite survived and new companies adapted to the new market requirements. A number of bad technical and management decisions leaded to this failure. 

References[1] http://jitm.ubalt.edu/XVI-2/article5.pdf
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ka_band
[4] http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/24/iridium.idg/
[5] http://www.davidvernon.net/David_Vernon/The_Canberra_Journal/Entries/2007/2/20_A_Heavenly_Sign_-_The_Iridium_satellite_story.html
[5] http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/iridiums-problems.php
[6] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/down-to-earth-reasons-for-iridium-failure-1113638.html