Orbcomm - Services

Services

ORBCOMM provides satellite data services, As of August 18, 2009, ORBCOMM reported 500,000 billable subscriber communicators on the company's U.S.-based gateway control center. ORBCOMM has control centers in the United States, Brazil, Japan, and Korea, as well as U.S. ground stations in New York, Georgia, Arizona, and Washington State, and international ground stations in Curaçao, Italy, Australia, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Argentina, Morocco, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia. Plans for additional ground station locations are under way.

Orbcomm is best suited for users who send very small amounts of data. To avoid interference, terminals are not permitted to be active more than 1% of the time, and thus they may only execute a 450ms data burst twice every 15 minutes. The latency inherent in Orbcomm's network design prevents it from supporting certain safety-critical applications.

Orbcomm's direct competition includes Globalstar's simplex services and L-band leased capacity services such as those offered by SkyBitz. Orbcomm's most significant competitor, however, is Iridium, which offers the lower latency and more capable Iridium SBD service which can send larger data packets with lower latency and a much smaller antenna.

ORBCOMM services are much like email and messages can be easily integrated with business applications. Customer data can be retrieved or auto-forwarded via SMTP or HTTP/XML feed directly over the Internet or through a dedicated link.

Orbcomm's other business is Automatic Identification System, or AIS, which is a widely deployed system used to track ocean vessels. Six satellites with AIS capability were launched in June 2008, referred to as the Quick Launch satellites. With the failure of all six satellites, however, Orbcomm will not be able to resume AIS service until the next-generation satellites launch.