Coverage is king, says Iridium North America, which is aiming to help cellular and personal communications services operators offer wireless coverage anywhere in the world.
Iridium L.L.C. is a Motorola Inc.-led consortium expected to offer global voice, paging and fax services via a constellation of 66 low-earth-orbit satellites by September. Iridium North America is one of 12 gateways around the world. It wants to sign agreements with mobile phone carriers that will allow them to bundle satellite service with their own terrestrial service.
“Thirty-five percent of the land mass in the world does not have (wireless) coverage,” said Iridium President Jim Walz. “If you go back 15 years, wireless started in a few major cities. It expanded into secondary cities, and then companies started forming roaming agreements. The next logical extension of wireless is taking that wireless subscriber in New York and simply telling them they can go anywhere on the globe. That is a very powerful proposition for certain segments.”
Iridium plans to introduce at least two models of dual-mode handsets by September capable of operating on terrestrial networks and Iridium’s satellite network. The professional traveler market has grown quickly during the last five years, and carriers realize the revenue opportunity from this segment, said Walz. High-end users give global roaming a high priority when surveyed about what value-added services they want, he said.
“Most carriers are moving to a revenue-driven mentality and realizing that there are lots of carriers vying for the low end of the market. They’re interested in any features that will retain those [high-end] customers,” said Walz.
Iridium, which expects to be one of the first mobile satellite service providers to launch service, plans to present itself as a wholesaler to mobile phone carriers that would, in turn, market the service by selling Iridium handsets to their customers and handle all billing.
