Iridium Certus IP performance in the Arctic - data analysis

In the last years, there has been an increased military and civilian activity in the Arctic areas. Earlier studies from the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) have concluded that a non-geostationary satellite system is necessary in order to provide the Norwegian Armed Forces with data capacity in the northern areas. One candidate is the Iridium satellite system.

Iridium is a low earth orbit satellite system that promises worldwide connectivity. By using an Iridium Certus SIM card from Marlink, specified to provide a 352 kbps best-effort service, we measured the quality of the IP service in the Arctic. The tests started in Longyearbyen, Svalbard on 14 August 2019, reached the North Pole on 21 August and ended close to Longyearbyen on 8 September.

The connectivity of the Iridium service was measured by testing the availability of the IP service over a Thales VesseLINK modem. Our study concludes that the connectivity in the Arctic is good.

The SIM card used supports 352 kbps, but this throughput capacity was only reached in 45 percent of the experiments. We identified the main shortcoming with Iridium as the long time periods (up to 70 seconds) where the IP packets are not served, which lead to high packet loss rates. High loss rates occurred frequently even at low load levels (25 kbps).