3/8/89 article. Satellite sales leads go begging [more on I* problems]
nwfusion.com
Network World, 03/08/99
Here's the good news for global
satellite telephony vendor Iridium: There sure are a lot
of people interested in your product.
Now guess how many of the dozens of people who
wrote to me could get their hands on one of your
phones?
In my last column, I reported my travails in trying to
sign up for Iridium's service, which supposedly lets
you use a handset to make calls from anywhere in the
world by bouncing signals off of a network of 66
low-earth orbit satellites.
I suggested Iridium was letting sales leads go down
the drain because the company couldn't bring itself to
tell prospects that its phone costs nearly $3,800 and
airtime is $2 to $7 per minute. That's the way it seems
to Network World readers who have been baited by
Iridium's ads, which focus more on flora and fauna in
remote areas of the world than on subscription plans.
"I was tentatively interested in an Iridium phone last
month and never could find anyone to talk to," says
one reader. "At least you got prices! Wow! I'll bet
their losses continue to mount with rates like that."
Another: "I filled out the information form on the Web
site, and I haven't heard from anyone, virtual or real. I
would have thought that with such high losses they
would be very interested in customers, but it does not
seem to be the case. It also seems quite interesting
that after reading every advertisement and most of
their considerable Web site that pricing is not to be
found."
Here's the response of one particularly diligent user: "I
tried all seven of the official North American
distributors. I left messages for four of them. One of
them actually answered, told me they'd send some
literature, and the other three had no answer. I gave
up after that. How much effort are we supposed to
put into spending thousands of dollars on a phone?"
One reader went to a Sprint PCS store in Kansas
City and was told it would be another couple of
months before it was ready to sell Iridium service.
Sprint, by the way, is one of the three principal
investors in Iridium North America, after Motorola
and Lockheed Martin.
Karla Williams, Iridium's director of marketing and
communications, says the company recognizes its
Web site deficiencies and is working to fix them. She
also says the company's price-point strategy is to
de-emphasize Iridium as an alternative to cellular and
to try to get people to compare it to the cost of calling
a foreign country over phone lines - without the
mobility and flexibility.
That's fine, if prospects ever get that far. It sounds like
Iridium distributors are actually afraid of bringing up
the price. It might be better if Iridium's home page
said, "Look, here's the deal - it costs X and if you
have sticker shock, no hard feelings. But we've got to
sell some of this stuff to get our stock price back to
$70 (it's now at around $25)."
Well, I do have one advantage - the power of the
press has landed me an Iridium demo next week by a
Baltimore-area representative. We'll see how that
goes. And oh, if someone out there does have Iridium
service, could you drop me a line? I want to know
how it's going.
Rohde is a senior
editor with Network
World. He can be
reached at
drohde@nww.com.
What do you think?
Jump into
nwfusion.talk and
start a thread.
Copyright, 1995-1999 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.
|
