Bad weather conditions earlier this week prevented Iridium LLC from launching five satellites by Delta rocket on August 19, and a new launch was planned this week. The company has had a run of bad luck recently, what with rockets blowing apart in January and squabbles with the prime contractor and 25% shareholder, Motorola’s Satellite Communications Group. Iridium has blamed it for several missed deadlines and delays (CI No 3,134). Despite its troubles, Iridium’s global wireless communications network, based on 66 low-earth-orbit satellites and land-based wireless systems to enable global telephone and pager services, is working successfully. The Iridium system is owned by Iridium LLC, an international consortium of 18 investors, telecomms and industrial organizations. Stocks in have soared recently, despite management changes and a radically different business plan from what was originally conceived. The company is focusing strongly on a new roaming and billing service connecting existing cellular networks, and The Wall Street Journal reports that Iridium expects 14% of revenues to come from paging, 17% from cellular roaming. The key attraction of cellular roaming is that users have one number and one monthly bill, regardless of location. Iridium telephones will have removable cards enabling them to work over nine different standards. Calls will be routed via Iridium’s proprietary cellular and satellite network. Where cellular networks are available, Iridium will use those. Where they are not, it will use satellite. The company hopes to have all satellites in place by April 1998, testing the service until the commercial launch in September. It will charge according to service, but both cellular and satellite customers will pay $50 per month plus usage fees. Satellite costs about $1.75 per minute, global cellular services are only 35 cents a minute plus local airtime and the cost of a long-distance call.
