s from one to another as the need arose. Unfortu- nately, Iridium's marketing strategy was flawed; their prices were high, their phones large and cumbersome (one newspaper article referred to them as "manly phones"), and their market significantly overestimated. Additionally, their system was only capable of supporting 64 Kbps voice services, a puny bandwidth allocation in these days of customers with broadband desires. In the last year the company failed but was pulled from the ashes. In June 2001 the company announced a resumption of service, but many still question the technology's viability: Iridium offers a maximum bandwidth level of 10 Kbps for $1.50 per minute. With the right kind of coaxing most traditional, terrestrial providers (AT&T, Sprint, WorldCom) offer comparable prices but significantly higher bandwidth. Iridium is not alone. ICO Global Communications, another satellite- based global communications company, filed for bankruptcy in August 2The system was named "Iridium" because in the original design the system was to require 77 satellites, and 77 is the atomic number of that element. Shortly after naming it Iridium, however, the technologists in the company determined that they would only need 66 birds. They did not rename the system "Dysprosium." Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Access Technologies Chapter 6 1999. In November of that same year, Craig McCaw, Teledesic, and Eagle River offered salvation for the company with an investment package val- ued at as much as $1.2 billion. Globalstar Others have been successful, however. Globalstar's 48-satellite array offers voice, short messaging, roaming, global positioning, fax, and data transport up to 9,600 bps. And while the data rates are miniscule by com- parison to other services, the converged collection of services they pro- vide is attractive to customers 