Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Iridium Beams In More Data Services

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2003 03:39:38 -0400

Iridium Beams In More Data Services
Contributed by mmasnick on Mon, Aug 4 2003

Iridium has decided that they can't be left out of the whole SMS craze, so for
those of you who just have to be able to send text messages while traveling to the
north pole, Iridium has come to the rescue. That's right, SMS text messaging is
now coming to Iridium satellite phones. Already you can send text messages to each
other, but next month you'll be able to send and receive regular SMS messages to
anyone else with an SMS-enabled phone.

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Iridium beams in more data services
By Ben Charny
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
August 4, 2003, 2:29 PM PT
http://news.com.com/2100-1037-5059740.html

Iridium Satellite, a provider of satellite phone services, added another
data-oriented offering to its quiver on Monday by launching short text messaging.

For now, Iridium's tens of thousands of subscribers will be limited to swapping
messages with fellow Iridium customers. By next month, however, users of the
company's SMS (Short Message Service) service will be able to trade text messages
with any number of U.S. cell phone subscribers, an Iridium representative said.

Iridium's SMS service can send messages of up to 160 characters and will likely
put pressure on rival Globalstar Telecommunications to improve its own short
message service, which now lets users send and receive messages of up to 19
characters.

Before it filed for bankruptcy protection in late 1999, Iridium only sold a very
narrow set of voice calling plans, one of the myriad reasons that the company
found itself in financial troubles. The company's new owners vowed to expand the
services with data offerings after taking the reigns in 2001.

The SMS service, which costs 40 cents per message, debuts two months after Iridium
launched Short Burst Data, which lets subscribers send and receive up to 1,960
bytes of information at a time. Iridium's first data service was wireless Web
access.
"We originally weren't built for data, but data users are now on our system five
times as much as voice callers," the Iridium representative said. "We didn't go
out and say we'd make this a data system. It really came out of demand."

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