The 5.2 billion dollar mistake.

Re:The 5.2 billion dollar mistake. by borism on Monday November 01, 2010 @05:20PM (#1858280)

There still isn't 100% GSM coverage in Asia - the most densely populated continent, let alone Africa and S. America. There are many many places that will never see GSM coverage. So I wouldn't write satellite communications off just yet.

Could you have predicted it in the 80s? Maybe, if you didn't have all this money to build exactly what they built.

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Re:The 5.2 billion dollar mistake. by oiuyhgthyjuki on Monday November 01, 2010 @05:54PM (#1858383)

Compared to the cost of installing conventional telecoms Iridium's $6Bn looked very cheap.

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.

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