Wow.  Everything old is new again, just this time with maybe a valid business model?  This story from Barron’s highlights how Iridium is planning an IPO in 2009.  This is after Billions of dollars of investment (mostly from Motorola), being picked up for $25MM, and actually understanding the target market was being eroded by terrestrial cellular coverage.  Oh..and that little bit about the phone being the size of a shoe box and not working indoors certainly didn’t help.  For full disclosure, I worked on a handful of market studies for the then "hot" mobile satellite communications market in 97/98 while at Arthur Andersen and, although our forecast was also on the rosy side, we identified cellular erosion as a key threat and dispelled the myth of the village phone in our results.  That is where I learned about teledensity.

"…the original Iridium business plan – to be a cellular replacement for consumers – was “a misguided proposition that Motorola created.”

Ouch.  Although the plan to supply this to "business customers" sounds eerily familiar, at least there appears to be some focus on defined use cases in maritime, trucking, oil and gas, etc.  And of course the Billions of dollars in investment capital has long since been written off so the hurdle is much lower at this point.  I look forward to watching the progress.