Washington Post – Iridium article
By Dan Beyers
Monday, November 29, 2010
One of the keys to business success, it seems to me, is the ability to shift to plan B when plan A is not working.
Iridium Communications had what sounded like a great plan A back in the late 1990s for creating a single mobile phone network served by a constellation of satellites that would allow anyone to make a call anywhere on Earth.
The only problem was that the cell phone world sort of beat the company to the punch, depriving it of a ready customer base once it had deployed its network of 66 low-Earth-orbit satellites.
Eventually, the highflying company landed in bankruptcy.
I stopped by Iridium’s Tysons Corner offices recently to find out how the company is doing these days — and was surprised to find things, umm, looking up.
Iridium is now working on its second act, choosing to partner with companies that could use a reliable communications link to accomplish some task in remote territory. The McLean firm still sells phones, for people at sea or working and fighting in far-flung places, but more and more, it is providing communications links to move data. An Iridium module might be collecting information from an ocean buoy or a pipeline someplace, or it could be used to track aircraft.
“We’re becoming an Internet of things instead of an Internet of people,” said chief executive Matthew J. Desch.
The company currently has about 240 partners, such as General Dynamics and SAIC, and more come forward every day. More than a fifth of its revenue comes from the U.S. government.
It has about 413,000 subscribers, up 22 percent from the 339,000 it had a year ago.
Desch feels good about Iridium’s prospects. The company, profitable now, recently announced that it had lined up financing to build a new generation of satellites to replace the ones in the air now. The new satellites promise to move data faster, and are configured to carry other equipment should anyone want to pay for the privilege of installing a payload.
The satellite business, though, is a risky one; plenty of companies have spent time in bankruptcy given the huge expense of getting birds in the air before it’s really known what kind of revenue they might bring in.
“Satellites can be cash machines but it takes 10 to 15 years,” Desch said.
If that’s the case, Iridium might be due.
November 29, 2010 10:59 am 
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