The funny thing is, they were right. Satellite phones are a big deal in places with limited/no infrastructre.
What they got wrong was the deployment details, too much weight was put on providing service to places where nobody actually is, like 75% of the Earth's surface that's ocean. So they ended up with 66 satellites in a polar orbit.
A better idea is like the Thuraya model, put a couple satellites up in geosynchronous orbit (so you maintain coverage) and get a huge coverage cone.
Today, with two birds, Thuraya covers 161 countries, pretty much all of Europe, most of Africa, all of Australia, and most of Asia and almost all of the coastal areas you're likely to find significant ship traffic in.
Even better, the phones are basically GSM phones and use SIM cards (they even look more or less like a normal cell phone and I believe you can use them for terrestrial service if you're within distance of a normal cell tower), you can get data service at 60kbps. Not blazing, but if you're stuck out in the middle of the Gobi and have a full battery you can check email and tweet. There's even sleeves you can get for smartphones to turn them into sat phones and indoor repeaters so you can use the phones indoors.
Two more satellites and they could provide something like 90% global landmass coverage.
Really the only people Iridium could ever have sold to would be the Navy. Which is basically what happened.
(apparently a next generation is being planned for 2015-2017 Falcon 9 launch series)
What they got wrong was the deployment details, too much weight was put on providing service to places where nobody actually is, like 75% of the Earth's surface that's ocean. So they ended up with 66 satellites in a polar orbit.
A better idea is like the Thuraya model, put a couple satellites up in geosynchronous orbit (so you maintain coverage) and get a huge coverage cone.
http://www.thuraya.com/network-coverage
Today, with two birds, Thuraya covers 161 countries, pretty much all of Europe, most of Africa, all of Australia, and most of Asia and almost all of the coastal areas you're likely to find significant ship traffic in.
Even better, the phones are basically GSM phones and use SIM cards (they even look more or less like a normal cell phone and I believe you can use them for terrestrial service if you're within distance of a normal cell tower), you can get data service at 60kbps. Not blazing, but if you're stuck out in the middle of the Gobi and have a full battery you can check email and tweet. There's even sleeves you can get for smartphones to turn them into sat phones and indoor repeaters so you can use the phones indoors.
Two more satellites and they could provide something like 90% global landmass coverage.
Really the only people Iridium could ever have sold to would be the Navy. Which is basically what happened.
(apparently a next generation is being planned for 2015-2017 Falcon 9 launch series)