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The costs of building and launching small satellites has dropped significantly since the 90s. People are also traveling more and demanding more connectivity, so

• mikeash 11y ago
  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.
  • seanp2k2 11y ago
    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.
    • mikeash 11y ago
      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.
    • vocatus_gate 11y ago
      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.