Company: IRDM
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001628280-25-005302
Chunk: 0

Company: Iridium Communications Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 0
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Item 1. Business

Business Overview

Iridium Communications Inc. (“we,” “us,” or “Iridium”) is the only commercial provider of communications services offering true global coverage, connecting people, organizations and assets to and from anywhere, in real time. Our low-earth orbit (LEO), L-band network provides reliable, weather-resilient communications services to regions of the world where terrestrial wireless or wireline networks do not exist or are limited, including remote land areas, open ocean, airways, the polar regions, and regions where the telecommunications infrastructure has been affected by political conflicts or natural disasters.

We provide voice and data communications services to businesses, the U.S. and foreign governments, non-governmental organizations, and consumers via our satellite network, which has an architecture of 66 operational satellites with in-orbit spares and related ground infrastructure. We utilize an interlinked mesh architecture to route traffic across our satellite constellation using radio frequency crosslinks between satellites. This unique architecture minimizes the need for local ground facilities to support the constellation, which facilitates the global reach of our services and allows us to offer services in countries and regions where we have no physical presence. 

The current Iridium® constellation was completed in 2019, fully replacing our first-generation system. In addition to supporting new products with higher data speeds, it hosts the Aireon® system, which provides a global air traffic surveillance service through a series of automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast, or ADS-B, receivers on our satellites. We formed Aireon LLC in 2011, with subsequent investments from several air navigation service providers, or ANSPs, to develop and market this service. Aireon has contracted to provide surveillance and other services to ANSPs and other customers around the world. Aireon has also contracted to pay us a fee to host the ADS-B receivers on our satellites, as well as data service fees for the delivery of the air traffic surveillance data over the Iridium system. In addition, we have an agreement with L3Harris Technologies, Inc., or L3Harris, the manufacturer of the Aireon hosted payload, pursuant to which L3Harris pays us fees to allocate the remaining hosted payload capacity to its customers and data service fees on behalf of these customers.

Our commercial business, which we view as our primary source of long-term growth, is diverse and serves markets such as emergency services, maritime, aviation, government, utilities, oil and gas, mining, recreation, forestry, heavy