The Defense Department is expected to extend its contract for Iridium
satellite communications services after the current two-year agreement
expires in 2003, officials said. Company executives said that traffic
on the Pentagon’s secure satellite communications gateway
has quadrupled since September 11.
“Given the success of the Iridium program to date, I would
be extremely surprised if we didn’t continue to provide service”
after the contract expires next year, said Gino Picasso, chief executive
of Iridium Satellite LLC, in Arlington, Va.
Iridium’s predecessor firm collapsed in 1999. The Defense
Department stepped in with a $72 million contract to save the constellation
of 66 low-earth orbiting (LEO) satellites from being destroyed and
the company survived, under new ownership. The Pentagon’s
contract provides unlimited remote communication access for 20,000
U.S. government users around the world. Iridium also built a secure
gateway in Hawaii, separate from its commercial gateway in Tempe,
Ariz.
Betsy Flood, a spokeswoman at the Defense Information Systems Agency,
said that the Defense Department gateway has logged 348,724 calls
between September 2001 and March 2002. That amounts to about 1.1
million minutes. The average telephone call is about three minutes
long.
There are approximately 8,100 users of the Iridium phones, 1,000
users of the pagers, and 7,100 who transmit both voice and data,
said Flood.
Picasso, who worked in the international satellite networking and
telecommunications sector for 20 years, joined Iridium Satellite
LLC soon after the Defense Department contract was signed in 2001.
A Wharton School of Business graduate who grew up in Lima, Peru,
Picasso is responsible for Iridium’s short and long-term business
strategies.
He said satellite phones and pagers are valued by the military
services, because “the first thing that goes in a disaster
is communications infrastructure.”
During overseas deployments, he added, it often is unrealistic
to be dependent on the communication infrastructure of a host country.
“When you’re doing military operations, you must have
independence of terrestrial infrastructure,” Picasso said.
Iridium communications require line-of-sight to the satellite.
A study by the Aerospace Corporation concluded that the constellation’s
expected life will extend through mid-2012, when initially it was
thought to extend only through 2007.
The satellite traffic increase after September 11, “accelerated
all of the programs that we already had in place. … I don’t
think anyone really understood how important independence from the
ground infrastructure would become.”
Picasso stressed that remote voice access is not the only capability
of the Iridium constellation. “Everyone associates Iridium
with the handset. But it has many more uses than that. We have fixed
mount units, that can provide communications in a land-based location,
and it also can go into ships. We have modules that are fairly unique,
that can fit on helicopters. We not only provide voice; we provide
data, with access speeds of about 10 kilobits per second. And we
also have short-burst messaging, which allows us to be able to do
remote sensing and monitoring, which opens up a whole new world
of capability.”
The antenna is small enough that the communications systems can
be used inside buildings. “We demonstrated this at the Adams
Mark Hotel (in Washington D.C.). We put it (the antenna) on the
roof of the hotel, and we were down 12 stories below,” getting
a strong signal through 12 reinforced concrete floors.
To increase the utility of the system, Iridium deployed five in-orbit
spares earlier this year, which were launched by the Boeing Delta
II vehicle. Two more in-orbit spares are set for launch this month,
bringing the total number of in-orbit spares to 14. The benefit
of in-orbit spares, in “special storage orbit”—at
360 nautical miles as opposed to the regular constellation orbit
of 430 nautical miles—is that they can be moved from low orbit
to high orbit as necessary, Picasso said. “If one of the satellites
fails, what we will do is move the satellite from storage orbit
into the regular orbit to replace the failed satellite.”
The spare can become operational as soon as one of the regular
satellites malfunctions.
Part of Iridium’s new business plan is to sell communications
services to foreign nations friendly to the United States, said
Picasso.
“We have deployed units with other nations. All of our allies
have adopted (Iridium Satellite LLC technology) in one way or another,”
he said.
Picasso explained that one of the company’s two commercial
gateways is in Fracino, Italy. “It has the capacity for a
much heavier volume of use,” he said. The company has made
headway in the commercial sector, particularly with customers in
the oil and gas exploration business.
The short-burst messaging technology is marketed as an oil well
monitor, which could alert managers to breaks in a pipeline, for
example. Picasso said that 30 percent of Iridium’s commercial
business comes from sub-Saharan Africa, where there are opportunities
for the mining industry, but very little in the way of land-based
communications.
Picasso explained that Iridium selects potential customer countries
by researching gross domestic product indicators such as “teledensity.”
The density of telephone services in remote locations, for example,
indicate independent investment and higher production rates, which
would make the atmosphere favorable for satellite communication
options.
“Teledensity is a function of GDP. Greater nations have
greater teledensity. For example, Mexico and Turkey have similar
GDPs per capita, yet Mexico has a lot lower teledensity than Turkey.”
Another important factor is the geographic dispersion of a population.
“It is expensive to run a wire a long distance. It is expensive
to put cellular towers in sparse populations,” he said. “The
fact is that there are reasonably developed nations that still need
infrastructure in remote locations.”
Iridium, additionally, could provide services in low-teledensity
countries through telephone companies themselves.