Company: IRDM
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001628280-25-005302
Chunk: 6

Company: Iridium Communications Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 6
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 services with true global coverage, including full coverage of the polar regions.

Our Competitive Strengths

•Our Constellation. Our unique satellite constellation provides true global and weather-resilient coverage, which enables our wide range of service offerings and empowers the development of new global products and services, as well as supporting Aireon’s aircraft tracking service and other hosted payload missions. Our network design of 66 operational satellites uses an interlinked mesh architecture to transmit signals from satellite to satellite, which reduces the need for multiple local ground stations around the world, facilitates the global reach of our services, and increases 

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network redundancy. Some of our competitors use GEO satellites, which orbit above the earth’s equator, limiting their visibility to far northern or southern latitudes and polar regions. LEO satellites without a crosslink architecture from operators like Globalstar and ORBCOMM use an architecture commonly referred to as “bent pipe,” which requires voice and data transmissions to be immediately routed to ground stations in the same region as the satellite and can only provide real-time service when they are within view of a ground station, limiting coverage to areas near where they have been able to license and locate ground infrastructure. The LEO design of our satellite constellation produces minimal voice and data transmission delays compared to GEO systems due to the shorter distance our signals have to travel, and LEO systems typically have smaller antenna and power requirements. Our L-band spectrum is also more resistant to weather interference than the K-band spectrum used by many of our competitors. 

•Attractive and growing markets. We believe that mobile satellite services will continue to experience growth driven by the increasing public expectations for reliable mobile voice and data communications services, the lack of coverage of most of the earth’s surface by terrestrial wireless systems, the continued development of the IoT, and the continued development of other innovative, lower-cost technology, such as applications integrating mobile satellite products and services into other devices, including embedding standards-based satellite technology in smartphones and IoT devices. Only satellite providers can offer global coverage, and developing a satellite network requires significant financial investment, as well as technological and regulatory challenges. We believe that we are well-positioned to capitalize on the growth in our industry from end users who require reliable, easy-to-use mobile communications services in all locations.

•Strategic relationship with the U.S. government. The U.S. government is our largest single customer, and we have provided airtime services to the U.S. government (particularly the DoD) since our inception. We believe the U.S. government views