Iridium went spectacularly bankrupt and was bought by a new corporation that was formed to acquire all of its assets... And with a little bit of engineering for better handheld, maritime and airborne terminals you know what they discovered? Rich people actually DO like to be connected in the middle of the ocean or anywhere that cellular service is unreliable. I would challenge you to find a private yacht on the planet with a value of >$175,000 that does not have an Iridium phone on board. Or a cargo ship of any appreciable size (likely to have both Iridium and Inmarsat terminals on board). Most private jets too.
As much as I like Iridium (and own an emergency handset) I think it was much more they learned that if you don't have to pay any of the capital costs for a satellite constellation and launch costs, and the DoD gets into an unexpected war on a side of the planet where they have an extreme need for more communications bandwidth - you can pull off a marginal business using what amounts to a government bailout.
Iridium existing as it is today has pretty much nothing whatsoever to do with it's commercial viability. It exists largely due to the original investors giving away a free network to the current operators, and an "anchor tenant" customer that was willing to more or less fund the network's opex for a number of years.
yes, all of this is true. The second incarnation of Iridium Corporation which acquired the bankrupt assets paid maybe 5 cents on the dollar. It was ridiculously expensive to build and ate up a ton of late 1990s venture capital money. And the US DoD gateway stuff (Hawaii, etc) and Iraq, Afghanistan wars certainly helped their revenue stream. But now that they're established, they seem to have found commercial viability and funding to launch the next generation of satellites which will provide medium speed (but expensive $$$/MB) data service in a truly global fashion.
Iridium's polar orbit LEO architecture makes it a rare and special thing. Globalstar was an utter network architecture failure (bent pipe satellite relay), Inmarsat is not usable at polar latitudes due to being geostationary based.
