Iridium Communications, whose origins lie in Motorola in the 1990s, provides a mobile voice and data satellite communications network that now covers the entire globe and connects people, organisations, and assets in real time.
Over the years it has built up an ecosystem of partner companies and has created an extensive portfolio of reliable solutions for global communications. The company is headquartered in Virginia in the US.
“Satellite communications are now, more than ever, seen as a viable alternative or complement to terrestrial infrastructure and are able to provide connectivity where cellular or Wi-Fi falls down,” explained Ian Itz, the company’s Executive Director of IoT. “It’s a market that is being driven by the launch of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites and communications modules. Iridium, which deployed its first satellite network back in 1998, completed its second constellation in 2019 working together with SpaceX. There was a total of nine launches with ten satellites on each load and we’ve established a new constellation of 66 satellites.”
The company has struck up an exclusive arrangement with SpaceX and was one of the first organisations to embrace the reuse of spent rocket cores.
The Iridium constellation is in a Low-Earth-Orbit which provides users with much stronger signals and faster connections despite using smaller antennas with lower power requirements.
“Our network uses L-band frequencies which are both resilient and better at providing more reliable communications, even in poor conditions,” explained Itz. “Iridium provides the core network and technology as it relates to the IoT.
“Today our network connects thousands of devices, and we are focused on personal communications for safety of life applications and industrial IoT and we produce NB-IoT modules for worldwide use, with a focus on making smaller devices for more challenging environments.
“Essentially, we’re a wholesale distributor that works through our partners and there are around 300 in our IoT ecosystem.
"Our aim is to cater for the developer providing the technologies that are related to IoT and we’re now in almost every market or vertical that’s served by satellite IoT.”
Iridium does not provide customers with a fully developed terminal, however, rather it’s about delivering “building blocks,” according to Itz. “They get a module, technical support to develop products, and then we can help to pair them up with component manufacturers to develop their final solution.”
One market in which the company has a strong presence is with heavy equipment manufacturers such as Caterpillar and Hitachi.
“We work with seven of the top ten companies in this space,” commented Itz. “We supply modules supporting data intensive applications and support real time connectivity, so we make it possible for equipment manufacturers to run real-time diagnostics in remote locations. In addition, they are also using more message-based services, which provide basic information coming off vehicles such as maintenance alerts and tracking.”
Iridium also supports telematics applications that are used to monitor vehicles in urban environments but then have to rely on satellite connectivity once they move into more rural or rugged terrains, where communications are more problematic.
Launched at the end of 2024 the company’s latest module, the Certus 9704, integrates with products of any scale to deliver cloud-ready data over Iridium’s satellite network. It exclusively supports IMT, a cloud-native, server-device messaging format that optimises Iridium network capabilities to match increasing demand from the industrial IoT.
“It comes without cables or added parts and is just a single component that can be soldered directly onto a PCB, which means developers can build more compact, rugged, and versatile devices,” Itz explained. “We’re planning to launch a string of new modules going forward and the next one will be a slightly more capable device.”
“Our aim it to create kit that anybody could buy, whether it’s a developer in college working on a prototype for a project, or somebody at a company who wants to develop a satellite solution,” added Itz.
Disaster relief
The company’s core business is providing critical satellite communications, but while it does a lot of work in maritime and fisheries, and other areas include aviation, agriculture and utilities, it has an especially important role when it comes to providing communications that can be disrupted after a natural disaster has occurred. “Our technology can dynamically shift network loads to provide more bandwidth,” explained Itz.
A good example of this is the recently announced strategic partnership with the World Central Kitchen (WCK), an organisation that’s dedicated to providing relief to communities experiencing natural, humanitarian, and climate-driven disasters.
According to Iridium, WCK was struggling with a lack of reliable local communications infrastructure and terrestrial communications can often quickly become disabled in a disaster situation, making it extremely difficult for first responders to act quickly and effectively deploy their relief efforts.
Iridium’s suite of connected devices was able to deliver real-time critical communications and having been designed to be both lightweight and highly mobile – gave WCK the ability to use voice call, message, email, and secure group Push-to-Talk communication anywhere in the world.
“Our L-band spectrum provides a strong, weather-resilient connection, so it makes for an ideal communications platform for teams like WCK operating in remote and challenging conditions,” Itz said.
The company’s extensive customer base has resulted in the development of a more open-source approach which has come as a response to the evolving needs of the developer.
“Our libraries and schematics are all accessible through GitHub, for example, so we are creating a more developer-friendly environment,” according to Itz.
Developers are looking to create powerful solutions on one platform, Itz suggested. “They want seamless connectivity between terrestrial and ground networks and most of Iridium’s modules are hybrids that operate across both types of devices. It’s about providing our customers and partners with options.
“There will always be a need for dedicated satellite devices which will be more robust. For us it’s about providing additional options and empowering hardware manufacturers to create platforms and applications that can roam on our network – we don’t want them being tethered to a specific piece of hardware.”
“Everything depends on where the device is going to be operating,” Itz explained, “and so that is what drives whether a module is going to be a dual mode device or a dedicated satellite device. A good third of our business is for devices that are doing dual mode applications.”
According to Itz there is real potential to do a lot more at the Edge.
“We could optimise how data is sent, so only critical pieces of data get sent over a satellite link,” he explained. “But we could also better manage temperature fluctuations and power consumption, all of those things could be built in so modules could become innately smarter and this is where artificial intelligence has a critical role to play.”
However, while AI is everywhere Itz does suggest that when it comes to communications a degree of caution is needed.
“AI can raise issues - whether that’s hallucinations or data leakage - so there has to be an acknowledgement that there will be a degree of risk. So, we are quite cautious as to how we might look to use it going forward in our operations but there are certainly potential benefits at the network level. Using AI, we could better manage loads moving them automatically without any kind of human interaction and it could be used to identify usage behaviour and network anomalies, as well as predicting attacks.”
According to Itz, a growing number of its partners are implementing AI, and it will certainly play a bigger part in Iridium’s business going forward.
