*9/2/99 Richardson letter to the WSJ
Iridium Llc
The Wall Street Journal -- September 2, 1999
Letters to the Editor:
Non-Terrestrial Way
To Phone Home
One fact of life about running a financially beleaguered company is that there is no dearth of people willing
to tell you where and how you went wrong. While the examination of Iridium's difficulties by Profs. Jagdish
N. Sheth and Rajendra Sisodia (Manager's Journal, Aug. 23) makes some valid points about our past
mistakes, it also suffers from a critical lack of understanding about what Iridium is trying to accomplish in
the global telecommunications marketplace.
Most notable is the premise that Iridium's global satellite telephone service is intended to compete directly
with terrestrial cellular phone service. This is not true. Iridium was designed to provide convenient,
hand-held voice communications and paging to 90% of the earth's surface (including the oceans) that is not
served by terrestrial wireless systems -- and won't be served in the foreseeable future. As the authors
note, accomplishing this global coverage has been a tremendous technological and regulatory feat. Today,
Iridium provides a single wireless network that covers the entire globe and is fully authorized to provide
service on more than 94% of the earth's surface. (The authors erroneously contend that "coverage . . .
excludes many countries in Europe, Asia and Africa.")
Accordingly, their thesis on why cellular succeeded, though well reasoned, has virtually nothing to do with
Iridium. Our business plan never contemplated the broad markets that cellular companies serve today.
Rather, Iridium was intended for customers who have an urgent need to stay in touch when they venture
out of that relatively small portion of the planet where cellular exists.
The fact is that Iridium will succeed not by making its service attractive to tens of millions of today's
cellphone users, but rather by becoming an essential telecom solution for people who need to
communicate from the world's remote areas: ranchers, foresters, miners, pipeline workers, boaters,
commercial fishermen and, yes, business executives who regularly travel to developing regions, to name
just a few. Notwithstanding our initial missteps in marketing our service, we believe there are more than
enough of them around the world to make Iridium a success.
John Richardson
Chief Executive Officer
Iridium
Washington |
