Live in the Booth with Iridium CEO Matthew Desch

Yeah, it's a program we started not that long ago. It's been a major investment to us to move from... we're already the leader in IoT by far in the industry with more subscribers and a global business with hundreds and hundreds of solutions and partners around the world. But the world wanted to move from proprietary to 5G standards to lower the cost of acquisition and deployment of products. We launched a $3 billion network in 2019. It happens to be extremely programmable. So we have spent the last two years and a lot of dollars kind of reprogramming that system to be able to provide a standardized IoT service. We got the 3GPP standards to recognize our band and our unique technology that's just been ratified in release 19. Chipsets have now been produced. We're working initially with Nordic but we'll have others. We're signing roaming agreements with mobile network operators now. So the idea would be this year we will be rolling out... we're live today in a number of places right now where we're tuning the service, but later on this year we will roll out a standard narrowband IoT service to our partners and customers and mobile network operators around the world, really being the first global narrowband IoT standardized service.

Everything we do is global. You know, we're still the only operator with 100% of the Earth's surface covered and as we roll this thing out, it will allow some money to... you know, we're going to be able to address use cases we've never been able to address.

Well, you know, for example, the automotive industries have been very uncomfortable adopting proprietary systems, not knowing... they don't know our industry well enough. We may be the biggest player in IoT, but Iridium is still small in comparison perhaps to the companies of Verizon or Vodafone and others that they would be comfortable rolling out a standardized product. So we're now talking to automotive companies around the world about, you know, for narrowband applications like airbag deployment or software download into updating their systems or emergency location services. They may have other technologies over time, but cell phones don't cover everything in the world and we would be a low-cost way of... you know, another application, smart meters. I can't tell you how many times meter companies have talked to satellite companies about saying, 'Do you have something to put in my meter because a couple percent of our meters are outside cell phone coverage and so we have to send people to do the meters.' Well, if the chip that they're buying today, the next version of that chip just happens to be able to talk to satellite, well, it just lowers the cost of being able to deploy that. And of course, you know, it's likely we'll be into other consumer devices, many other IoT applications over time. It's just going to greatly expand the set of applications we're already able to support.

So what I was saying during that panel discussion, first of all, I talked to a lot of investment bankers today. That seems to be what this show sometimes is about, is the speed dating we do where we all tell each other what we know about the industry. And so everyone was talking D2D at this show, of course, the rumors about, you know, potentially who's going to get acquired by whom, the interest in L and S-band, you know, moving from sort of a cellular-based D2D system to an L and S-band global service that is based on 5G new radio standards. That's a lot of interest to everyone. But what no one knows is what the size of the D2D market is. They don't even know how to exactly define what it is. Certainly in the broadband smartphone kind of environment, people talk anywhere between 10 billion to... as I said, somebody actually said this is a trillion dollar market, which is probably consistent with the enthusiasm, unbridled enthusiasm right now. Maybe a trillion-dollar IPO is spurring that on when all these investment bankers are going to get a cut of that. But really, we don't really know what the size of the D2D market is. We don't know exactly how the services will operate yet. We don't know how good they're going to be. We don't know what they're going to cost. Someone probably does, but we aren't talking a lot about that. So, we don't know what the adoption's going to be, what the ARPU's are going to be. I think it's a little premature to start talking about giant numbers. But we think it's going to be a bigger market. You know, the MSS L and S-band market today is 3 to 4 billion. It will be bigger than that. Will it be a factor of 2, 3? I don't think it's going to be a factor of 500 or whatever. So we'll see.

Yeah, it's... you know, it's the first time in our satellite industry where the customer is buying the terminal for other reasons. So we don't have to incent someone to even buy... a Starlink terminal today is a couple hundred. That's amazing when you think about only 5 to 10 years ago was a $10,000 terminal, right? So that's great, but what if it didn't cost anything? And the same way with IoT today, one of our IoT proprietary modems that runs our technology for our millions of customers is maybe, you know, 60, 70, $80. What if it's just in the cellular chip that you have today? That really cuts out a lot of friction. How big does it grow the market? We don't know yet. It will certainly grow the market. We're excited about the potential, but I think given the billions and billions of dollars being spent on both spectrum and, you know, perhaps companies, we're certainly in an era of enthusiasm for this prior to market introduction.