MARKETING SATELLITE MOBILE PHONES

"It's a fantastic marketing opportunity. It's another way to get in front of the traveling professional person who requires real-time communication" (McCullagh & Van Voorst, 1998). The speaker was discussing the new marketing possibilities of bringing the mobile phone services to the consumer.

Iridium LLC became the world's first global satellite phone and paging company on November 1, 1998. An expensive network of 66 low-earth orbiting satellites, combined with terrestrial cellular systems, enabled customers to communicate virtually anywhere in the world using one phone and pager, one phone number, and receiving one monthly bill.

The normally sedate Telecom Weekly (1998) said this "The Iridium satellite phone might just be the coolest, most fashionable tech toy of the year. There has never been anything like it. You can make a call from absolutely anywhere on Earth. In a city, you can use it like a roaming cell phone because it's adaptable to nearly every country's cellular system. Out in the wilds, you can turn on the much more expensive satellite capabilities. There is even an Iridium pager" ("Satellite News" 1998, 3).

The phones promise to talk on all cellular networks, but come with a high price. Made by either Motorola or Japan's Kyocera, each phone costs almost $3000-$4000 when loaded with all the attachments that make it work on every cellular network. In addition, the cost of a satellite call is about $3 a m

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er Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code after it defaulted on more than $1.5 billion in loans ("Iridium phone" 1999). News announcements of the Chapter 11 suggested that one of the reasons is was that areas of the world that are not covered by wireless telecommunications are shrinking very rapidly, so the target market for satellites is shrinking. But by the time Iridium's system was operational late last year and before ICO Global started service, cell towers were quickly popping up along highways and on top of buildings across the United States and around the world. Digital satellite phones promise better voice quality and less voice delay than those on analogue satellites. They will offer most of the functions of GSM terrestrial networks, including voice, data, voice mail and personal numbers. They will need much smaller handsets than existing analogue satellites, little bigger than a GSM phone (typically 12-16 oz), although these will be expensive (Fehr-Snyder, 1998). Most handsets will work on GSM as well as satellite, enabling users to roam at will, using GSM connections where available, and satellite in the gaps. The only drawback is that if the user moves out of range of GSM during a call, it will not automaticall

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