No surprise, the only usecases back then for the price that Iridium and others commanded were SAR, a few military/secret service style use cases and execs who deem themselves to be of such importance that they need to be reachable on the globe 24/7 even if they are just taking a flight over the Atlantic or on a cruise ship, and Iridium can't be reasonably used for much more than that.
> Now SpaceX is eating their lunch.
Partially due to physics. Latency on Starlink is reportedly low enough to run online games or telephony and the bandwidth high enough to allow for video streaming in the outback, which makes the potential market size muuuuch bigger so the price point can be lowered enough to be competitive with landline DSL of all things.
The problem is, SpaceX isn't something that the US government can rely on forever. For now, its leader is in good standing with the 47th, but that may change overnight (it has happened with either of these characters before and both have quite the large egos that will collide rather sooner than later). And what to do then?
Argo floats use them, Slocum gliders and Seagliders use them (underwater AUVs). There's lots of Iridium resellers out there and small companies offering backup GPS tags like RocksBlocks and Novatech and Argos (not too be confused with Argo, or Argos the brand).
We get enough data back to build up vertical profiles of the water column down to like 6000m depth with enough resolution that scientists can pick out physical chemical and biological features of interest. We communicate with the AUVs every couple of hours on average and they are operating all year round. I think there's probably a couple thousand underwater-glider style AUVs and a couple thousand Argo floats being used in total by the world's oceanographic institutes, meteorological institutes, militaries and coastguards etc.
It's a small niche, but a small niche that's been collectively using Iridium for the best part of over 2 decades now and one that is very conservative about change.... Like extraplanetary rovers with radiation hardened hardware, deep sea pressure tested robots use tried and tested stuff so we're a long ways off switching to higher bandwidth alternatives... Especially since Iridium comms are very low power and the modems are easy to integrate into things.. tiny boards which accept AT commands over serial.
It does not suprise me at all that security flaws have been found in Iridium. Most of our applications of it don't even consider security, the hardware itself rarely offers encryption, and old-school Iridium RUDICS requires you to open up a raw TCP port on a server open to the internet for your satellite devices to dial into in RUDICS mode, and if you're using SBD you're sending plaintext emails back and forth to the Iridium gateway service. The whole thing is very "security is not our problem" which means nobody thinks about it. I believe the military versions of one of the underwater glider AUVs has a login prompt now lol, but still sends unencrypted passwords over the plaintext RUDICS connection.
Terrestrial networks in the meantime have only gotten better and improved coverage. Not that many customers, relatively, need satellite comms.
Now SpaceX is eating their lunch.
I don’t think the market for satellite comms has ever been big enough for a pure-satellite company to get enough money to do something cool. SpaceX can afford the R&D because they are a little more diversified.