Iridium introduces new products to enhance portfolio
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Iridium introduces new products to enhance portfolio
Iridium Burst is the satellite company’s newest service that lets manufacturers embed satellite connectivity into their products to enable communications with a piece of equipment that’s located in almost any environment, Thompson said.
“Iridium Burst is part of our M2M strategy and platform, which is the world’s first global data-broadcast service,” he said. “It allows us to send a single message to thousands or millions of devices within a geographic area. Effectively, all of our transceivers just sit there and, when they receive a message that has been attributed to a specific group, they will take that message in and display it, whether it’s a text message or firmware or software.”
Because of the bursty nature of the short messages it is designed to support, Iridium Burst signals are four times more powerful than the signals supporting an Iridium voice call, Thompson said. This makes the Iridium Burst platform ideal for M2M applications and alert notifications, he said.
“Iridium Burst, with a small, inexpensive device built by a partner, could provide communications to any location—inside building, outside a building, in a vehicle, in an aircraft, on the side of a mountain, outside and inside terrestrial coverage,” Thompson said. “Imagine receiving that emergency alert in Colorado, because there’s a forest fire and your cabin is in the way and you’re out of terrestrial coverage.”
“Iridium Burst is not a broadband connection by any stretch. But when you’re talking about alerts and command and control, it’s more about simple, basic messaging. It’s not reaching back into police databases or pulling an image of a suspect. It’s much more about delivering information into the field to a mass number of people at the same time, so they all get that message and they all get the heck out of Dodge, if they need to.”