May 1940: it seems to haunt the people of France. Perhaps it is an attempt to expiate that sense of shame of that period that so many Frenchmen strive to show themselves to be so very much braver than the rest of us. They climb vertical, mirror-smooth rock faces with only a bag of chalk as an aid, or crawl around no-man's land bringing succour to the wounded of wars no-one else ever heard of, or shoot rapids wearing concrete shoes.
Jo Le Guen - I am unable to tell you what the name Le Guen means; my French dictionary reports that guenon is a she-monkey, but for Guen, it is discretion itself - is very much one of the 1940-was-not-typical school of Frenchman. He is currently rowing alone across the Pacific; and with him, to report his solitary progress across the greatest ocean in the world he has an Iridium mobile phone, a single extension within the most expensive and complex satellite communication system in world history.
Irridium is the brainchild of the giant Motorola corporation, designed to be the ultimate global-link between humans from pole to equator. It would transform the world, and to do so, would require one of the greatest investment packages in history. In order that every corner of the world be accessible 24 hours a day, Motorola contracted for a total of 66 satellites to be lofted into near-space orbit.
Vast resources
Each satellite, at huge expense and calculation, was placed in an orbit which would ensure it would take up the duties of its fellows, 485 miles above the surface of the world; calls that one was handling would, as it passed over the horizon, be transferred without interruption to its replacement. Dozens of multimillion pound rockets were required merely to get these satellites in place. It was a project that required huge vision, breath-taking imagination, astonishing technological ability, and utterly vast resources; and Motorola had all of these.
But most of all, it needed time - years, in fact. From the moment of its inception to the glorious hour when the world network was complete took over a decade. A decade is a long time in technology; and while Motorola were striving with this super-stratospheric colossus, more modest manufacturers below were working on the concept of smallness. To be sure, a satellite here or there mightn't be a bad thing; but the entire network needn't be run entirely off satellites. And that was the problem with Iridium. Its phones didn't speak to ground stations, which beamed their messages towards the nearest available loitering satellite. Iridium phones communicated directly with the satellites themselves.
This meant they were big, and they were clumsy, and expensive: at least £2,000 a unit. But there was nowhere in the world you couldn't phone. My Esat Digiphone, for example, doesn't pick up a signal in Ballymore Eustace, never mind the central Pacific or the darkest Amazon. Had I a £2,000 Iridium set, I could phone a lone trans-Pacific rower or a lost Brazilian explorer from the square in Ballymore. And what conversational japes we could have!
Me: Allo, Jo, d'ici en Ballymore Eustace!
Jo: Allo, Ballymore Eustace. Comment allez-vous?
Me: Bien, merci - et vous?
Jo: Tres wet; et froid; et fatigue.
Me: Vraiment? Quel dommmage! Ah. Here's me bus. Au revoir, Jo!
Jo: Au revoir, vous gobshite.
Investment return
But as Iridium was to find out, the market for this kind of communication is rather limited. There are few people of any nationality either in the square in Ballymore or in a boat in the centre of the Pacific who want to talk to one another. The return on investment is liable to be small; and if the investment runs to $7,000,000,000, profits at best will be slim, even without the competition from small handsets the size of your thumbnail, which will talk to almost anywhere in the world, though not Ballymore or the mid-Pacific.
In all, Iridium found across the wide-world just 50,000 customers for its communications system: i.e. each customer cost $140,000 to acquire. It takes a lot of phone-calls from Ballymore to a boat in the Pacific to recoup that sort of outlay; and I'm not sure there's room in Ballymore village square for them all. Nor did the financial nightmare end with the capital outlay - it cost $10 million a month just to keep the satellites in orbit: that is, $2,000 per customer.
Are you beginning to think that maybe this operation is not commercially viable? Good. You have a future in the Financial Services Centre - which is probably more than I can say for Randy Brouckman, the Iridium Chief Operating Officer. He's been trying to sell off space on his satellites - after all he has 66 of them - or even the satellites themselves, and with about as much success as De Lorean.
Bankruptcy
What does a fellow do with five dozen communications satellites no-one wants? Last weekend, Randy bowed to the inevitable, and put his company into bankruptcy. A judge gave Iridium permission to nudge its satellites out of costly earth orbit. They will soon come crashing into the atmosphere, and our night-skies will be lit with the Iridium's burning hopes.
Which is fine for most of us; but not fine for Jo Le Guen, halfway across the Pacific with a boat, two oars and an Iridium telephone which has the communication-skills of a wet biscuit.
There is a lesson here. All that glisters is not gold; and simply because something is high technology, and assuredly the road ahead, does not mean that prosperity is the certain outcome. Soon so many of these highly-priced .com companies which are reaching insane prices in stock markets around the world will be imitating Iridium satellites. Don't take my word for the commercial limitations of modern technology - ask Randy Broukman. Or better still, ask Jo Le Guen, bobbing alone and phone-less thousands of miles from anywhere.