Company: IRDM
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001628280-25-005302
Chunk: 34

Company: Iridium Communications Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 34
---
, or PLMN, and the internet. The use of a TPN allows grounding traffic at multiple locations within our ground network infrastructure. This and other design elements provide flexibility that allows for rapid reconfiguration of grounding traffic from the satellites in the event of a space, antenna or ground routing anomaly and results in greater reliability of our network. The design of our space and ground control system also facilitates the real-time monitoring and management of the satellite constellation and facilitates service upgrades via software enhancements. 

We believe our interlinked satellite infrastructure provides several advantages over low-earth-orbiting “bent-pipe” satellite networks that rely on multiple terrestrial gateways, such as Globalstar’s, ORBCOMM’s and OneWeb’s networks. We have the only satellite network with true global coverage using weather-resilient L-band spectrum, and our constellation is less vulnerable to single points of failure, as traffic can be routed around any one satellite problem to complete the communications path to the ground. In addition, the small number of ground stations increases the security of our constellation, a factor that makes our network particularly attractive to government institutions and large enterprises. The low orbit of our constellation and L-band frequencies also allows our network to operate with low latency and with smaller antennas due to the proximity of our satellites to the earth.

Our constellation is designed to provide significant coverage overlap for mitigation of service gaps from individual satellite outages, particularly at higher northern and southern latitudes. Each satellite in our constellation was designed with a high degree of on-board subsystem robustness, an on-board fault detection system, and isolation and recovery capabilities for safe and quick risk mitigation. Our ability to reposition our satellites provides us with operating flexibility and enhances our ability to maintain a commercially acceptable level of service. If a satellite should fail or become unusable, in most cases we will be able to reposition one of our in-orbit spare satellites to take over its functions within days, with minimal impact on our services. 

We do not currently hold any active in-orbit insurance policies covering losses from satellite failures, and we do not expect to obtain in-orbit insurance covering losses from satellite failures or other operational problems affecting our constellation.

Our primary commercial gateway is located in Tempe, Arizona, with a second commercial gateway located in Russia for traffic within Russian boundaries only. A gateway processes and terminates calls and data and generates and controls user information pertaining to registered users, such as geo-location and call detail records. The U.S. government owns and operates a dedicated gateway for U.S. government users, which