It looks like Iridium is planning on becoming a publicly traded company, by merging with a company that is publicly traded.

Iridium is pretty much the only worldwide satelite telephone provider which provides coverage to every corner of the world (with a decent view of the sky of course). Other providers like Thuraya provide only regional coverage, and Globalstar, which provides, in theory, decent land-based coverage, has been plagued with problems.

Since it will take GlobalStar, the only true competitor to Iridium, a while to launch new satellites and sort out its problems, it's a good time for Iridium to do a public offering. Of course, their current position won't last forever, if and when GlobalStar manages to sort out its problems.

Secondly, even poor countries are launching mobile networks like nowhere else, and there are very few countries in the world (certainly not poor ones) where a quadband GSM phone won't work. If anything, imporverished countries with little other infrastructure are embracing cell phone networks as their primary form of telecommunications. Surely a mining company or oil/gas extractor could make a deal with one of the incumbent firms to build a tower to cover their operations even when coverage does not exist.

In other words, the situations where an Iridium phone is the only option (seafaring vessels and oil rigs come to mind here) and they can charge whatever they please, are becoming fewer and fewer. Military service contracts also come to mind here. This will only decrease the value of the company and its service over time, unless they can reinvent their business model. They haven't tapped into the middle-class world-traveller or emergency backup circuits as much as they can.