hckrnws

I was once offered an engineering manager position at iridium (which i discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41748519)-- that entire company is a race to reduce the bottom line. They offered me (an engineering manager to 5 engineers) a lower salary than I was offered as a new grad. Also their talent pipeline is quite stale, most of the engineers on my prospective team were at the org for 10-20 years. For such an interesting aspect of technology, it's ashame they can't attract more talent, such an untapped market low earth orbit satellite networks are...

Iridium and other satellite companies also went bankrupt and their satellites were going to be de-orbited until the US Government bailed them out in the 2000s. They couldn’t get enough customers to support enough launches.

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.

> They couldn’t get enough customers to support enough launches.

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?

The other usecase has been Oceanographic sensors and moorings, and GPS tags on things. Iridium RUDICS gets you verrrry slow dialup connections to things and Iridium Short Burst Data gets you ~1800 byte messages sent 'mailbox' style. We use Iridium for sending them commands but also a surprising amount of useful data can be stuffed into those ~28k connections and 1800 byte payloads.

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.

>Now SpaceX is eating their lunch. Fact Check Time! Iridium stock jumped 15% today, because their 4Q earnings vastly beat expectations. They earned $0.31 per share versus expectations of $0.16 Their Revenue grew 9% Year over Year to $213 million

Iridium, that is a name I've not heard in a long time.

IMHO, the worst places to be are organizations that were supposed to change the world, but didn't, and don't quite get it.

Your experience totally tracks with that.

They set up global satellite communications over 20 years ago. They did change the world.

This seems like it should be totally expected. Iridium's engineering efforts are largely in the past, they're purely in the revenue extraction mode at this point. Your job description is basically just "maintain obsolete legacy system just enough to make money."

Starlink ate Iridium's lunch. Any benefits Iridium was supposed to provide are currently achieved by Starlink.

Maybe specialty hardware? Are there handsets yet which can connect to starlink?

iPhone, most notably.

Much more than iPhone. From Tmobile's FAQ [0]:

Apple iPhone 14 and later (including Plus, Pro & Pro Max), Google Pixel 9 (including Pro, Pro Fold, & Pro XL), Motorola 2024 and later (including razr, razr+, edge and g series), Samsung Galaxy A14, A15, A16, A35, A53, A54, Samsung Galaxy S21 and later (including Plus, Ultra and Fan Edition), Samsung Galaxy X Cover6 Pro, Samsung Galaxy Z Flip3 and later, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 and later and REVVL 7 (including Pro)

[0] https://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/satellite-phone-service?ic...

Starlink Direct to Cell is not available yet

I have it on my Pixel 9 Pro XL right now and have had it since the end of January. Worked well so far for me in the country where Tmo typically has had dead spots, if not a little slow.

https://i.imgur.com/wrl5KLf.png

That is just texting though, not voice or data.

Let's not move goalposts. It's still undeniably both "Starlink" and "Direct To Cell," so I would say that Starlink Direct To Cell is indeed available.

Moving the goalposts? The point I was refuting was "Any benefits Iridium was supposed to provide are currently achieved by Starlink", but Iridium offers services today which StarLink does not.

Is it 5G only or does LTE also work?

It's only for texting so it doesn't really matter. That said Iridium is so slow it's mostly only useful for texting type situations as well. Even the voice is so heavily compressed and laggy as to be mildly unpleasant to use.

Sadly I expect them to be at the stage of no relevance. Just enough that as another commenter said it could make some money but satellites have no business value.

Their value is the niche of being able to work at the poles, unlike any other constellation, despite being dialup speed.

But how can you translate that to dollars today?

"Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story" by John Bloom is a must-read for anyone remotely interested in satellites, communication networks, or corporate management. The project achieved several outstanding engineering feats, then fumbled into an almost unrecoverable position, then rose from the ashes into the small niche it holds today.

Plus, "Early calculations showed that 77 satellites would be needed, hence the name Iridium", is an eternally cool piece of trivia.

I concur: was a very good read! Can wholeheartedly recommend.

My guess is, that similar flaws have been known and exploited for ages. I doubt that iridium was ever truly safe to begin with. I was recently looking into renting an iridium satellite modem and while doing so, I found a pdf on some shady private intelligence agencies website that documented a tool to intercept calls and messages as well as locating users of the network. The screenshots looked like a late 90s, early 2000s windows ui and talked about special radio equipment that the tool interfaces with.

Search for "Iridium Interception System reference manual pdf"

> I found a pdf on some shady private intelligence agencies website that documented a tool to intercept calls and messages as well as locating users of the network. ... Search for "Iridium Interception System reference manual pdf"

This? https://pegasusintelligence.com/docs/iridium-monitoring-syst...

> The screenshots looked like a late 90s, early 2000s windows ui and talked about special radio equipment that the tool interfaces with.

Mid-2000s. A lot of them have dates, and they're all Jan/Feb 2007.

This has been known for a while. You can buy the RTL-SDR Blog antenna on Amazon:

1. https://www.amazon.com/RTL-SDR-Blog-1525-1637-Inmarsat-Iridi...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_jDTs79kq8

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKO8hgtJUZ0

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-mPaUwtqnE

5. https://www.rtl-sdr.com/talk-decoding-data-from-iridium-sate...

I assume the article is based on this presentation at 38c3: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-investigating-the-iridium-satell...

As Sec said in 2015, "The problem isn't that Iridium has poor security. It's that it has no security."

  >Users' locations and texts can be intercepted, including DoD employees

If this was Starlink, you're kidding yourself if you think this wouldn't be dominating an entire news cycle, and then transition into an endlessly repeated mob refrain.

Since it's not, I expect crickets.

I yearn for the old days when the default media slant and popular reach of tech news wasn't merely a function of its proximity to Elon Musk.

Starlink has 4.6 million users, an extremely rapid growth rate, and an outspoken owner who’s currently in the news for causing what amounts to a massive cybersecurity breach. Iridium has fewer than half as many users and it and its leadership are not household names.