Once the hardware decisions were made they were locked in. The lead times in aerospace are nothing like software or consumer electronics. You can't exactly tweak your hardware when it's orbiting the earth at 500 miles.
By the time they launched they must have known of the shortcomings for several years but it was too late to do anything about it. The best they could do is launch and hope that a big enough niche would emerge to fund further development. Sadly, that didn't happen.
It was a bold, daring plan that achieved spectacular results. They were very unlucky it didn't work out commercially - even if the reasons are obvious in hindsight. I don't see how they could have done any better.
Who knows, maybe one day somebody will figure out a novel way to capitalise on it.
Could you have predicted it in the 80s? Maybe, if you didn't have all this money to build exactly what they built.
Their big mistake was assuming that mobile phone usage would be a limited special market alongside landlines. They didn't consider that much of the 3rd world would simply skip over the cost of installing landline infrastructure and cell phones would be the cheap alternative so leading to a much larger demand and cheaper phones and calls.
Agreed. One thing missing from the article is that the Iridium satellites only offer a paltry 2.4Kbps for data communications. In 1997 and 98 the business world was still largely on dial-up. Internet access on the road was patchy and incredibly expensive. If they'd pivoted to global data coverage at even 28-56K, I think they would have had a far more significant take up.
The obvious customers were seafarers, but they had been using Inmarsat for years. Their network achieved near-global coverage using four geosynchronous satellites. You needed a big antenna and a powerful transmitter, but that was no problem on an ocean-going vessel. The same went for fixed installations in remote areas on land. Inmarsat was at the time a UN-backed nonprofit established to improve safety of life at sea and was under no particular commercial pressures.
GSM took off in a huge way in the early nineties, so by the time Iridium launched most of the developed world was blanketed in GSM coverage. Multi-band handsets and roaming agreements meant that most travelling business customers already had a handset that worked just about everywhere at relatively low cost.
There was still a gap in the market for portable communications in less developed and more sparsely populated areas, particularly Africa and the Middle East. The later network Thuraya solved that problem cheaply and elegantly by putting a geostationary satellite over Ethiopia and covering most of the market for handheld satellite phones after just one launch. They now cover 70% of the world's land mass with just two satellites and are far more profitable than the revived Iridium.
Iridium could have pivoted. They had a lot of sunk R&D costs, but the initial 66 satellites were built and launched in an enormous binge between 1997 and 1998. They had a gap of at least six years between conceiving the idea and building the first piece of hardware. I believe that they failed to do so because they were preoccupied with the idea of providing truly global handheld telephony, rather than the more mundane task of making a product that people want. Iridium brilliantly solved the technical problem of providing telephone coverage to parts of the world with very few people, but failed to realise the basic flaw in that business model.
Iridium turned out to be a wonderful gift to humanity, but it was a bloody awful business decision.