The first Iridium call was made from Vice President of the United States Al Gore to Gilbert Grosvenor, the great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell and chairman of the National Geographic Society.
[9] However, due to optimizations of orbit trajectories, technology updates and real-world conditions, only 66 are required for global coverage.
[11] The handsets could not operate as promoted until the entire constellation of satellites was in place, requiring a massive initial capital cost of billions of dollars.
Reception indoors was difficult and the handheld devices, when compared to terrestrial cellular mobile phones were bulkier and more expensive, both of which discouraged adoption among potential users.
In 1999, CNN writer David Rohde detailed how he applied for Iridium service and was sent information kits, but was never contacted by a sales representative.
[22] In June 2010, Iridium announced a fixed-price contract with Thales Alenia Space for the design and construction of the next-generation satellites for the upgraded constellation.
[24] On January 14, 2017, 10 years after the campaign was first announced, the first of eight Iridium NEXT launches took place with SpaceX from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
[26] The Iridium NEXT network covers the entire Earth, including poles, oceans and airways, with 66 satellites, with the remaining nine acting as active backups, for a total of 75 launched.
[30] Iridium manages several operations centers, including Tempe, Arizona and Leesburg, Virginia, United States.
[35] In July 2011, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a ruling that approves the use of Iridium for Future Air Navigation System (FANS) data links, enabling satellite data links with air-traffic control for aircraft flying in the FANS environment, including areas not served by Inmarsat (above or below 70 degrees latitude) which includes polar routes.
The certification ended a monopoly on the provision of maritime distress services that had previously been held by Inmarsat since the system became operational in 1999.
[37] In 2023, Qualcomm and Iridium announced an agreement that was supposed to bring two-way satellite messaging service to Android smartphones.
"[40][41][42] In 2024, Iridium introduced Project Stardust, a 3GPP standard-based satellite-to-cellphone service focusing on messaging, emergency communications and IoT for devices like cars, smartphones, tablets and related consumer applications.
Scheduled for launch in 2026, it won't replace the company’s proprietary solution for voice and high-speed data; instead it will co-exist with that offering on the Iridium's existing global low-earth orbit satellite network.
Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Iridium structured their operations to comply with US sanctions and stopped shipment of end-user equipment to Russia.
Despite this, In 2023, Iridium Communications, via some unknown intermediaries, imported machines made by the American parent company for receiving and converting voice and images.
[51] The second launch of Iridium NEXT satellites took place on June 25, 2017 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket out of Vandenberg Air Force Base.
Three of these MDAs may be selected on a web-based portal or updated automatically if the paging service is bound to an Iridium phone.
Pagers are assigned with telephone numbers in area code 480 and can also be contacted using email, SMS and the web-based interface used to send messages to Iridium phones.
The following transceivers have been released over the years: These devices support only SBD for Internet of things (IoT) services and do not use a SIM card.
Latency for data connections averages 1800 ms round-trip, with a mode of 1300 to 1400 ms and a minimum around 980 ms.[72] Latency is highly variable depending on the path data takes through the satellite constellation as well the need for retransmissions due to errors, which may be around 2 to 3% for mobile originated packets under good conditions.
[77] According to the company, it is the only LEO satellite based commercial positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) service (as of April 2024).