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A profitable satellite company with a lot of debt and satellites that target the previous model of bespoke terminals when the market is moving to satellite serv

A profitable satellite company with a lot of debt and satellites that target the previous model of bespoke terminals when the market is moving to satellite service on regular phones.

hobonation 3mo ago
Iridium terminals can be very power-efficient. Consumer ones are the size of a deck of cards and can last for days.
- Scoundreller 3mo ago
  I wonder how much of the power-efficiency is due to being much slower. Don’t need to blast and beam-steer if you can deal with poor SNR by taking your time to differentiate the 0s and 1s? Which is more power efficient per megabyte? (But I get it: sometimes a few bits is all you need)
  - lxgr 3mo ago
    All of it. You can't really get around physics. Iridium has historically targeted low-power, omnidirectional terminals (antennas can be larger at lower frequencies without requiring steering than at higher frequencies). They recently had some forays into steered, high-bandwidth antennas with their Certus line and their second-generation satellites that now allow native packet switching (the first gen was circuit-switched at 2.4 kbps only), but that brings you into the bandwidth-limited regime, and is honestly just a waste of scarce L-band spectrum and much better served by all the Ku- and Ka-band LEO competitors. It's going to be interesting to see if Rocketlab start also serving that market, like some of their main competitors already are.
    - labcomputer 3mo ago
      > (antennas can be larger at lower frequencies without requiring steering than at higher frequencies). No. 1. Iridium uses frequencies fairly close to GPS (~1.6GHz). 2. Iridium uses cylindrically-polarized transmissions (like GPS), which enable compact omnidirectional helical antennas > They recently had some forays into steered, high-bandwidth antennas with their Certus line and their second-generation satellites that now allow native packet switching (the first gen was circuit-switched at 2.4 kbps only), but that brings you into the bandwidth-limited regime, This is AI slop? No, the point of using an electrically-steered beam antenna is that it improves SNR, so that you are not bandwidth limited.
      - lxgr 3mo ago
        > 1. Iridium uses frequencies fairly close to GPS (~1.6GHz). 2. Iridium uses cylindrically-polarized transmissions (like GPS), which enable compact omnidirectional helical antennas Which part of my argument is this an objection to? Are you saying that using circular polarization, the same would be possible in the Ku or even Ka bands? Because that’s definitely not the case due to the different aperture/gain tradeoff vs. L-band, and that’s my point. > This is AI slop? Did I say anything incorrect there or do you just not like my writing? > No, the point of using an electrically-steered beam antenna is that it improves SNR, so that you are not bandwidth limited. Sure, but my point was: At low frequencies, you can steer to become more efficient per bit, but at high frequencies you almost have to, as you’re sending energy in suboptimal directions otherwise. And then if you’re already steering, why not use a less-scarce band?
amluto 3mo ago
> the market is moving to satellite service on regular phones. I don’t think there a unified “market” here. The fixed rooftop terminals and fixed-ish roaming terminals use high (tens of GHz) frequencies with correspondingly wide bandwidth, have excellent beamforming capabilities and some degree of MIMO to improve spectrum reuse, and consume an amount of power that would be outrageous for a phone. Phones don’t have reliably clear views of the sky and have much weaker RF capabilities. Oh, and phones are well served by existing 4G and 5G networks in dense areas, with better spectrum reuse than seems practical for a satellite constellation. I expect that we will actually see two separate markets that happen to share the same satellites and backhaul.
- piltdownman 3mo ago
  //I don’t think there a unified “market” here. You mean like the ASTS/Vodafone partnership that birthed the Satellite Connect Europe? https://www.vodafone.com/news/newsroom/technology/satellite-connect-europe-launches-direct-to-device-broadband-satellite-connectivity https://www.vodafone.com/news/newsroom/technology/satellite-... https://www.vodafone.com/news/newsroom/technology/vodafone-ast-space-mobile-announce-european-sovereign-satellite-operations-centre https://www.vodafone.com/news/newsroom/technology/vodafone-a... Or like the US JV where they provide the infra for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260513491108/en/AST-SpaceMobile-Commends-Proposed-Direct-to-Device-Joint-Venture-by-U.S.-Mobile-Network-Operators https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260513491108/en/AST... //Phones don’t have reliably clear views of the sky and have much weaker RF capabilities. And they appear to have circumvented that, although ease of scaling remains to be seen. https://www.reddit.com/r/ASTSpaceMobile/comments/1k6whtf/rakuten_ceo_demonstrates_a_live_video_call_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ASTSpaceMobile/comments/1k6whtf/rak...
  - amluto 3mo ago
    My claim is that these are not the same market as the traditional Starlink service.
  - lxgr 3mo ago
    They didn't circumvent phone antennas being largely omnidirectional (unlike VSAT or phased arrays, which are highly directional) and as a result having much lower gain, they just work with it, just like Iridium, Globalstar, Inmarsat, Thuraya, and all the other early players in what's now called "direct to device". The market is as bimodal as ever on the device side: On one side, you have small, battery-powered, (mostly) omnidirectional device antenna, portable devices that mainly operate in the L-band, which works much better in these conditions; on the other side, you have highly sophisticated, steered, high power (dozens of watts) antenna arrays operating in the Ku or Ka band. On the satellite side, both can be served by the same satellites, as has been the case for e.g. Inmarsat's I-6 series and Starlink's direct-to-cell capable satellites (I believe these all include Ku-band coverage as well).
lxgr 3mo ago
Iridium is launching 5G standards-based direct-to-device capabilities this year: https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-ntn-direct https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-ntn-direct
- NetMageSCW 3mo ago
  Only for companies that choose to make or support phones with Iridium connectivity included, as opposed to AST and Starlink targeting existing phones.
  - lxgr 3mo ago
    Kind of: Phones will probably need some Iridium-specific RF hardware (unless their existing baseband and amplifiers happen to cover the band it uses), but the baseband and signaling stack won’t be proprietary anymore if I understand it correctly. Several mass-market phones already are IoT-NTN compatible, e.g. Google’s Pixel line.
numpad0 3mo ago
I'm not sure if that kind of great replacement theories stand anymore. That happened once with iPhone, and... what else? All the direct-to-cell stuffs are limited to simple texts as well. IIUC they require the phones to be out in the wild with nobody around and patient with the rituals of sending messages, like how earliest forms of GPS receivers worked. I don't see that changing that much in coming few years.

A profitable satellite company with a lot of debt and satellites that target the previous model of bespoke terminals when the market is moving to satellite service on regular phones.

hobonation 3mo ago

Iridium terminals can be very power-efficient. Consumer ones are the size of a deck of cards and can last for days.

Scoundreller 3mo ago
I wonder how much of the power-efficiency is due to being much slower. Don’t need to blast and beam-steer if you can deal with poor SNR by taking your time to differentiate the 0s and 1s? Which is more power efficient per megabyte? (But I get it: sometimes a few bits is all you need)
- lxgr 3mo ago
  All of it. You can't really get around physics. Iridium has historically targeted low-power, omnidirectional terminals (antennas can be larger at lower frequencies without requiring steering than at higher frequencies). They recently had some forays into steered, high-bandwidth antennas with their Certus line and their second-generation satellites that now allow native packet switching (the first gen was circuit-switched at 2.4 kbps only), but that brings you into the bandwidth-limited regime, and is honestly just a waste of scarce L-band spectrum and much better served by all the Ku- and Ka-band LEO competitors. It's going to be interesting to see if Rocketlab start also serving that market, like some of their main competitors already are.
  - labcomputer 3mo ago
    > (antennas can be larger at lower frequencies without requiring steering than at higher frequencies). No. 1. Iridium uses frequencies fairly close to GPS (~1.6GHz). 2. Iridium uses cylindrically-polarized transmissions (like GPS), which enable compact omnidirectional helical antennas > They recently had some forays into steered, high-bandwidth antennas with their Certus line and their second-generation satellites that now allow native packet switching (the first gen was circuit-switched at 2.4 kbps only), but that brings you into the bandwidth-limited regime, This is AI slop? No, the point of using an electrically-steered beam antenna is that it improves SNR, so that you are not bandwidth limited.
    - lxgr 3mo ago
      > 1. Iridium uses frequencies fairly close to GPS (~1.6GHz). 2. Iridium uses cylindrically-polarized transmissions (like GPS), which enable compact omnidirectional helical antennas Which part of my argument is this an objection to? Are you saying that using circular polarization, the same would be possible in the Ku or even Ka bands? Because that’s definitely not the case due to the different aperture/gain tradeoff vs. L-band, and that’s my point. > This is AI slop? Did I say anything incorrect there or do you just not like my writing? > No, the point of using an electrically-steered beam antenna is that it improves SNR, so that you are not bandwidth limited. Sure, but my point was: At low frequencies, you can steer to become more efficient per bit, but at high frequencies you almost have to, as you’re sending energy in suboptimal directions otherwise. And then if you’re already steering, why not use a less-scarce band?

amluto 3mo ago

> the market is moving to satellite service on regular phones. I don’t think there a unified “market” here. The fixed rooftop terminals and fixed-ish roaming terminals use high (tens of GHz) frequencies with correspondingly wide bandwidth, have excellent beamforming capabilities and some degree of MIMO to improve spectrum reuse, and consume an amount of power that would be outrageous for a phone. Phones don’t have reliably clear views of the sky and have much weaker RF capabilities. Oh, and phones are well served by existing 4G and 5G networks in dense areas, with better spectrum reuse than seems practical for a satellite constellation. I expect that we will actually see two separate markets that happen to share the same satellites and backhaul.

piltdownman 3mo ago
//I don’t think there a unified “market” here. You mean like the ASTS/Vodafone partnership that birthed the Satellite Connect Europe? https://www.vodafone.com/news/newsroom/technology/satellite-connect-europe-launches-direct-to-device-broadband-satellite-connectivity https://www.vodafone.com/news/newsroom/technology/satellite-... https://www.vodafone.com/news/newsroom/technology/vodafone-ast-space-mobile-announce-european-sovereign-satellite-operations-centre https://www.vodafone.com/news/newsroom/technology/vodafone-a... Or like the US JV where they provide the infra for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260513491108/en/AST-SpaceMobile-Commends-Proposed-Direct-to-Device-Joint-Venture-by-U.S.-Mobile-Network-Operators https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260513491108/en/AST... //Phones don’t have reliably clear views of the sky and have much weaker RF capabilities. And they appear to have circumvented that, although ease of scaling remains to be seen. https://www.reddit.com/r/ASTSpaceMobile/comments/1k6whtf/rakuten_ceo_demonstrates_a_live_video_call_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ASTSpaceMobile/comments/1k6whtf/rak...
- amluto 3mo ago
  My claim is that these are not the same market as the traditional Starlink service.
- lxgr 3mo ago
  They didn't circumvent phone antennas being largely omnidirectional (unlike VSAT or phased arrays, which are highly directional) and as a result having much lower gain, they just work with it, just like Iridium, Globalstar, Inmarsat, Thuraya, and all the other early players in what's now called "direct to device". The market is as bimodal as ever on the device side: On one side, you have small, battery-powered, (mostly) omnidirectional device antenna, portable devices that mainly operate in the L-band, which works much better in these conditions; on the other side, you have highly sophisticated, steered, high power (dozens of watts) antenna arrays operating in the Ku or Ka band. On the satellite side, both can be served by the same satellites, as has been the case for e.g. Inmarsat's I-6 series and Starlink's direct-to-cell capable satellites (I believe these all include Ku-band coverage as well).

lxgr 3mo ago

Iridium is launching 5G standards-based direct-to-device capabilities this year: https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-ntn-direct https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-ntn-direct

NetMageSCW 3mo ago
Only for companies that choose to make or support phones with Iridium connectivity included, as opposed to AST and Starlink targeting existing phones.
- lxgr 3mo ago
  Kind of: Phones will probably need some Iridium-specific RF hardware (unless their existing baseband and amplifiers happen to cover the band it uses), but the baseband and signaling stack won’t be proprietary anymore if I understand it correctly. Several mass-market phones already are IoT-NTN compatible, e.g. Google’s Pixel line.

numpad0 3mo ago

I'm not sure if that kind of great replacement theories stand anymore. That happened once with iPhone, and... what else? All the direct-to-cell stuffs are limited to simple texts as well. IIUC they require the phones to be out in the wild with nobody around and patient with the rituals of sending messages, like how earliest forms of GPS receivers worked. I don't see that changing that much in coming few years.