Iridium (1998-2001 original)

» see iridium.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the demographic that bought iridium handsets in 1998 was helicopter pilots and oil-rig managers: people on deep-pocket remote contracts who needed a phone that worked from anywhere with a clear view of the sky. that was not my crowd. in 1998 i was fourteen, on a 33.6k modem in ankara, and the most exotic communication device anyone i knew owned was a nokia 5110 that received SMS messages with a satisfying click.

iridium was the bet that the future of mobile phones would happen in low earth orbit. motorola engineers spent the early nineties putting 66 active satellites and a handful of spares into a polar mesh. each satellite could hand off a call to the next one as both moved across the sky, so a user with the right handset could in theory make a phone call from the south pole or the middle of the pacific. the engineering was real. on november 1, 1998 commercial service began, with handsets priced at three thousand dollars and per-minute rates around five.

the forecast was 500,000 subscribers by the end of 1999. the reality was around 10,000. by august 13 of that year iridium LLC filed chapter 11 with roughly four billion dollars in debt. motorola itself was on the hook for about two-and-a-quarter billion of that. it was, at the time, one of the twenty largest bankruptcies in U.S. history.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what went wrong ~

the assumption underneath iridium was that global cellular roaming would never arrive, so a traveling executive in 1998 needed a separate satellite phone to make calls from anywhere outside their home network. that assumption was wrong within eighteen months. by 1999 GSM had spread to most of the countries iridium customers were actually visiting, and a normal cellphone with a roaming agreement worked in most major cities for a tenth of the cost. the satellite handset also did not work indoors or in cars, and was unreliable in any dense urban area. it needed a sightline to the sky. you had to step outside and wait for a satellite to pass over, which on average took less than a minute but felt like an eternity to anyone holding a brick-sized handset at arm's length.

the second problem was the handset itself. early iridium phones were the size of a thick paperback book with a thick stubby antenna sticking out. nobody who had felt a 1998 nokia in their hand wanted to carry an iridium phone instead.

~ what got buried with it ~

in november 1999 motorola announced it would deorbit the satellites to avoid further operating costs. the constellation was going to be intentionally burned up in the atmosphere. a group of private investors led by dan colussy bought the entire iridium asset base for twenty-five million dollars in march 2001 and restarted operations under the name iridium satellite LLC. a service contract with the U.S. department of defense anchored the revenue base. the satellites kept flying.

the new entity eventually went public again in 2009 and replaced the original constellation with iridium NEXT between 2017 and 2019. the brand still exists today, attached to a working business with eight-hundred-million-plus in revenue. but the original iridium, the one that bet four billion dollars that the future of phones was in orbit, is gone. what got buried with it was the entire 1990s vision of satellite-as-primary-communications. terrestrial cellular won the consumer market, completely.

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