ORBCOMM provides satellite data services, As of August 18, 2009, ORBCOMM reported 500,000 billable subscriber communicators on the company's U.S.-based gateway control center. 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 best suited 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.
