Of course, the military can have people trained to set up a system for comm when required. And despite certain aspects of the system that worried us at the Pentagon relative to military use, it seems to be popular, at least among the special ops crowd.

Yes, it’s damn long. But that’s what separates the men from the boys, so to speak!

And speaking of Iridium, that certainly ended up being a commercial failure. But those birds are still up there, and I suspect they aren’t going to waste.

I’m an avowed libertarian. But I don’t mind the government subsidizing some stuff like this every now and then.

Anyone have solid info?

bah. could be a whale fart. but where’s the entertainment in that.

In the article they were discussing the different attitudes of telephony people and computer data people, and they even mentioned the coming of the Iridium satellite system. Ironically, this attitude problem is where the Iridium people really screwed up. Motorola failed to recognize the significance of the Internet and made their system suitable for voice only, like a telephone system. That was the big mistake, but they compounded it by making setting up to talk on the phone as complicated as those guns they used to assemble on The Man From UNCLE, charging a very high price for the both equipment and talk time, and then expecting the governments of Russia and China to do marketing for them. The company gave up on Iridium and even planned to deorbit the satellites, but finally sold it all for a ridiculously low price, the equivalent of getting a Ford Excursion Mega-SUV by sending in 4 cereal boxtops and 25 cents.