A spokesman from Motorola, a communications and embedded electronics company, offered a glimpse into the future of telecommunications to students at the Computer Science Club meeting Wednesday night.

John Nelson, an engineer from the Motorola offices in Phoenix, Ariz., gave an hour-long presentation on the company’s extensive Iridium project.

Nelson said Iridium was designed to give cellular phone service to any location in the world, employing a network of 66 low-orbit satellites to make the task possible. It is the first satellite-based phone service, he said.

The service is available in several forms, he said, including mobile cellular phones and phone booths.

“If you get inside your car, you use a car antenna unit,” Nelson said. “There is also an Iridium pager. It looks and acts just like a regular pager.”

The idea for Iridium was conceived in 1987, he said.

“The design started to come together really strong about 1990, and the design was essentially done by ’97. So the technology is early ’90s technology,” Nelson said.

The phone costs about $1,000, and the service currently costs about $2 or $3 a minute.

“[The price] is going to come down as the quantity of users goes up,” Nelson said.

He said there are two kinds of users for the special service.

“One type is a user or company that makes phone calls from a place where there is no service,” he said.

“Another type of user is one who goes all around the world and doesn’t want to carry four cell phones around to have coverage everywhere,” Nelson said. “So with one Iridium phone and one phone number, they can go anywhere in the world and make a phone call.”

Nelson said one of the biggest customers has turned out to be a fishing fleet off of Korea.

As the Iridium system evolves, the phones will be smaller and lighter and Motorola will add new features to the system, he said.