In its statement released at the Europort Maritime exhibition in Rotterdam, the global mobile satellite communications carrier said that both the number of subscribers had grown by 30& percent this year and that revenues from the marine industry are also up substantially in 2005, reflecting income from new subscribers as well as increased usage by existing customers.
Individual successes reported by Iridium are as follows:
- some of the world's largest shipping fleets switching to Iridium for a wide range of voice and data applications over the last two years;
- 50% rise in 2005 of deployments of Iridium's prepaid scratch-card Crew Calling service;
- 119% rise in deployments in 2005 of Iridium's In-Network calling service, which takes advantage of low charges for calls between two Iridium satellite telephone units;
- the network architecture allows calls to be routed directly through the satellites end-to-end without any additional long distance charges from landline carriers;
- shipping fleets are installing Iridium satellite antennas on their office buildings to communicate with their ships at rates significantly less than $1.00 per minute; and
- maritime data traffic up 60% in 2005, twice the rate of growth for voice.
