Iridium Satellite announced that it had more than 114,000 subscribers as of December 31, 2004, a 22.5% increase over its total number of subscribers at the end of 2003. The company’s revenue for the full-year 2004 increased by 23.2% over total revenue for the prior year.
In the general aviation market, the company surpassed a milestone in October of 2,500 aircraft using Iridium-based equipment — roughly double the number equipped in 2003. In the maritime industry, Iridium announced four significant agreements in 2004 resulting in more than 300 ships being equipped with Iridium satellite terminals. In the defense/government sector, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) exercised an option to extend its contract for airtime on the Iridium network for mobile voice, data and paging services. The U.S. government relies on the Iridium network for many applications, including command and control, logistics and tracking systems, battlefield and weather condition data transmission, remote unattended sensor programs and man-pack soldier systems.
In 2005, Iridium plans to complete the development of a new netted push-to- talk communications architecture. This architecture will provide an efficient broadcast service within a designated region for military, homeland security and commercial applications requiring netted voice and data communications. Iridium expects to make this innovative service available in Q4 2005.
In the second half of 2005, Iridium will launch a new lower cost data modem for short-burst data communications. This data module will leverage the 100% global coverage of the Iridium network and will feature low latency, two- way communications, broadcast and high throughput data capabilities.
http://www.iridium.com/
