Iridium Satellite LLC, a privately held company, is the only provider of truly global satellite voice and data communications solutions with complete coverage of the entire Earth including oceans, airways and even Polar Regions.  With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif.  The company supplies both voice and data connections and it also designs, builds and sells its products, solutions and services through a worldwide network of more than 150 partners.   

Iridium is a profitable company and has been since 2004.  For a company like Iridium, whose satellite network services run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, non-disruptive data migration is essential.  The company is focusing on specialized users: the military, the news media and the maritime industry.

The company's name comes from the platinum metal with atomic number 77 in the periodic table of elements, a reference to the initial plan to place 77 satellites in space.

Iridium delivers reliable, secure, real-time, mission-critical communications services to and from areas where landlines and terrestrial-based wireless services are either unavailable or unreliable.  Iridium is a mobile satellite service that provides ubiquitous, gap-free, reliable coverage over Polar Regions, which are used by aircraft on international flights. 

Iridium’s constellation of 66 low-earth-orbiting (LEO), cross-linked satellites (and multiple in-orbit spares) provides critical voice and data services for regions not served by other communication networks.  In addition to providing voice service, Iridium is marketing data communications for shipping companies that want to remotely monitor containers in transit.  They're targeting a much broader market of average business people and vertical markets like maritime, mining, forestry-people who operate in remote locations and they don't have access to cell, or in some cases, any phone service. 

Its 66 satellites provide 100% coverage of the globe, enabling callers to talk from high peaks or the middle of the high seas, and from practically anywhere in a largely unwired Third World.  To provide uninterrupted coverage around the globe, Iridium operators choreograph an intricate dance in space, monitoring the satellites as they speed along at 17,500 mph in crisscrossing paths 480 miles above Earth's surface. 

Their network support a variety of satellite phones. You can view some of them at

http://www.iridium.com/products/product.htm