Area Phone Entrepreneur Says He’ll Buy Iridium System

A Rolling Hills telephone entrepreneur said Wednesday that he has reached an agreement with Motorola Corp. to buy the Iridium satellite system and take it out of bankruptcy, but the two parties refused to confirm the agreement and said there are other bidders still under consideration.

Gene Curcio, who said he operates a number of small-scale telecommunications ventures, said he hopes to use Iridium’s 66 orbiting satellites to provide phone service in Brazil and other areas with poor land-line infrastructures. But Curcio declined to disclose the amount of his bid or identify his financial backers.

Iridium is scheduled to disclose the outcome of the auction of its assets at a hearing Friday in bankruptcy court in New York.

Motorola, which created and invested heavily in Iridium, plans to shut down the service at midnight Friday if a qualified buyer does not step forward. It would then nudge the satellites out of orbit into trajectories that would allow them to vaporize harmlessly in the upper atmosphere.

Curcio said he has contracted with General Dynamics to take over operation of the system from Motorola after a transitional period of 60 to 90 days. A General Dynamics spokesman confirmed that agreement, but said the company was not participating in Curcio’s bid and accepted the job on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Scott Wyman, a Motorola spokesman, would not confirm that Curcio has a signed purchase agreement, or even whether he is among the bidders.

“We are aware that there are a number of interested parties,” he said, adding that several parties, including bankers and Iridium investors, would have to review any bids for a system on which investors have already spent about $7 billion.

Iridium filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code last summer after signing up fewer than 50,000 customers for its global telephone service. That was too small a customer base to support the service, which also suffered from high per-minute charges and telephones that were comically bulky and hard to use.

The satellite system briefly attracted the attention this year of cellular phone pioneer Craig O. McCaw, who considered buying Iridium to jump-start his Teledesic satellite communications project.

But McCaw evidently concluded that the Iridium satellites, which were launched over the last few years, were already outdated technologically and that the system could not be upgraded to handle today’s communications traffic.