Iridium has a problem...

[Tusker]

I see that of the two satellites that collided, spreading debris over Siberia..

One was Russian, out of service for 10 years,

The other was one of Iridium's constellation of 66.

I wonder how the sat phone service will be affected? More drop outs?

Regards
Max P

[rmp]

Should be fine. The satellite may not even be one that flies over Australia, and if even if it is they have spares, plus your phone changes satellies once every 3-4 minutes anyway as they are low-earth orbit. If one of the networks with a geostaionary bird loses it then you need to worry.

[JamesH]

Interesting, I thought the Iridium network was defunct. I knew sat phones still existed but I never put the two together.

[rmp]

It was, but it was bought out for next to nothing and is operational again. Basically the technology was fine but the marketing and business side failed, the immense costs didn't help.

[scrambler]

It's a really clever idea, basically a collection of space-based mobile phone towers, low enough that minimal power is needed to talk to them, but for that reason whizzing across the sky fairly quickly - but hey, it's no different to driving along in your car moving from tower to tower. As above, the business side went belly-up but was resurrected and last I heard Telstra was the agent in Australia. If your satphone doesn't need an antenna pointing north (ish) then it's on the Iridium network.