Thank you for warning me about my NXTL investment which has an average cost of 15 & change and has caused my ENTIRE portfolio to almost double in 1999.
"Do you know why Europe didn't do this?"
Geez, your memory works poorly. The US government at the HIGHEST levels jumped into the fray to wrestle with the Europeans. IT WAS POLITICAL ARM TWISTING. Europe correctly saw the GSM-CDMA battle as akin to Boeing-Airbus. Childish? Depends on your point of view. Regardless, the Europeans didn't give away the farm.
"Do you have any figures available that show Nextel will not start running into capacity constraints within a year?"
Yes. I have a detailed report from Chris Larsen at Prudential which says that NXTL's theoretical user capacity is 48 million users. Assuming they are off by half, that's still 24 million users. I have prepared a NXTL financial model through 2005 which projects 2005 earnings of $6.93 per share based on 13.2 million users @ 64 arpu. I project that will support a stock price of $300 or more within 2-5 years. NXTL never claimed that they wanted to be the biggest, just the best. With less spectrum (currently) than the two other national footprints (T & PCS), NXTL knew that to succeed they would have to focus on the high end while leaving the commodity business to others. The biggest digital wireless winners will be the national footprints with the bones left to the regionals.
"As far as marketing effort, I hope you realize there are two things that are most important to subscribers, They are cost and coverage. Hmmm, I didn't hear DC mentioned there."
That's because you're not listening. My guess is that you have never used DC. If you had, your attitude about its instant communication would be different.
"Somehow I get the feeling that I am making you believe in Nextel with even more fervor. Oh well, makes little difference to me."
That's not possible as I've been a strong bull on NXTL for 2 1/2 years. While I haven't posted much on SI recently, if you go back to around 3/97 you'll see my posts all over the place. With the rise of Yahoo, I've since been posting regularly on the Yahoo Nextel thread. If you want to arm wrestle with folks who are more technically savy than me, join us over there. You'll find that it's one of the best threads on the entire internet.
Arnie
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