Iridium® Satellite has unveiled its new Iridium OpenPort enhanced-bandwidth marine communication system that will hit the market in the middle of this year.
“This breakthrough product will bring a fresh element of competition to the marine satcom market,” said Matt Desch, chairman and CEO of Iridium Satellite. “Iridium OpenPort offers an unbeatable value proposition of multiple phone lines, IP connectivity and flexible data speeds up to 128 kilobits per second (kbps), with equipment and airtime costs substantially lower than any competitor.”
Iridium will target the new service toward the deep-sea shipping and commercial fishing segments. “Iridium OpenPort provides a complete integrated solution for ship-to-shore crew calling, email and IP-based data communications,” said Greg Ewert, executive vice president of Iridium Satellite. “Our pricing strategy replaces expensive pay-per-minute billing schemes with a straightforward, cost-effective, pay-per-megabyte plan for data transfer.”
The Iridium OpenPort ship terminal provides dynamic allocation of three independent telephone lines and a high-speed data port configurable from 9.6 to 128kbps and all voice and data circuits can be used at the same time.
