Displaying items by tag: ORBCOMM

ORBCOMM Inc. is a company that offers machine to machine (M2M) global asset monitoring and messaging services from its constellation of 29 Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) communications satellites orbiting at 775 km.

Like its voice-centric competitors Iridium and Globalstar, it filed for Chapter 11 protection, in September, 2000. ORBCOMM issued a public offering of stock in November 2006. The company sold 9.23 million shares of common stock.

ORBCOMM provides satellite data services. 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 offering services 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.