The new Enhanced Mobile Satellite Services contract is two years longer and $238,500,000 higher than Iridium’s five-year contract signed in 2013.
Some 125,000 subscribers use Iridium services under the Enhanced Mobile Satellite Services contract.
Iridium still owes $1,630,000,000 under the BPIAE credit facility according to a 2019-07-23 SEC filing.
Under the new Enhanced Mobile Satellite Services contract, Iridium stands to receive an average of $105,000,000 per year.
The International Telecommunication Union deployed 50 satellite phones from Iridium and broadband terminals from Inmarsat to the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian.
Iridium CEO Matt Desch warned that if megaconstellations launch thousands of satellites and 10% malfunction, those failures could create hazardous debris in low Earth orbit.
Government services accounted for $22,000,000 of Iridium’s $133,700,000 in quarterly revenue.
The 2013 EMSS contract with Iridium had a total value of $400,000,000.
On 2019-04-09 the U.S. Department of Defense signed a one-month, $8,300,000 extension to bridge to a new multi-year EMSS agreement with Iridium.
Iridium disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it received the Hawaii ground station contract at least a month before 2019-04-22.
Iridium provides unlimited voice and data satellite communications services to the U.S. Department of Defense through a five-year EMSS contract awarded in late 2013.
Iridium received a separate Defense Department contract renewal worth up to $54,000,000 to upgrade a government-dedicated ground station in Hawaii.
Upgrades to the Department of Defense gateway should enable the gateway to support Iridium’s Certus connectivity products by 2020.
Iridium partnered with Dutch startup Hiber in September 2017 to work together on IoT services.
Iridium declared the completion of its $3,000,000,000 constellation refresh in early February with the activation of the final two spacecraft needed to complete the L-band voice-and-data network.
Aireon borrowed $200,000,000 in December through a Deutsche Bank-led group of investor funds and used those funds to start paying Iridium overdue fees for hosting its sensor network.
Iridium received a $2,500,000 contract under the Defense Experimentation Using the Commercial Space Internet program.
Iridium announced a transceiver on 2019-01-06 that provides 35 times the data speed of existing devices.
By the time SpaceX launched the first Iridium Next satellites in January 2017, Iridium had already run out of spares and had lost one operational satellite.
The legacy Iridium fleet built by Motorola and Lockheed Martin was designed mainly for voice communications.