WCOM DOES NOT HAVE A STRONG WIRELESS STRATEGY TO DELIVER WIRELESS IP TO AN INTERNET HUNGRY WORLD.
Fiber owners will tend to become merely UPS or Fedex trucks for wireless traffic unless they migrate up the stream closer to end users. Wireless is a great way to get there and WCOM has a great LMDS play afoot.
There are predicted to be 450 million wireless Internet devices sold in 2003! Who is going to sell them and what networks will they connect to?
Everyone realizes that in a decade most voice and lots of IP will go wireless but it will take time, and we all want it now!
The CEO of Orange Cellular, UK admitted that dirtside wireless broadband would not start until 2003.
The cellular operators need to rebuild most of their entire infrastructure to support wireless broadband and it will cost them untold billions to do it.
Teligent and others are in the game in the US but its a slow push to date.
SPACE: Pioneer group predicted satellites will become the predominant broadband carriers worldwide by 2007 with over twice the growth rate of dirtside systems, why, just look at direcPC, it only cost them $1 billion to set up the infrastructure to deliver 150 channels of clean TV to every home, hut and Winnebago in North America. To run cable would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The cable industry called DirecPC the "deathstar"
Wireless is the potential third wire into everyone's home and satellites will be the fourth wire. But none of this will really kick in until 2002-3.
The Cable guys can't get their act together, thats why CISCO, WCOM and others are throwing money at any wireless alternative that might get there. They all want bandwidth to users to drive sales of routers and PC's and its true, bandwidth expansion now drives and determines the level of sales of every electronic device imaginable.
Who will win? The ones with the boldest business plans and the better technology to deliver more IP to more people for less money and the capital to build the infrastructure to get around the Telcos.
when you eliminate the bull, Its all about price per bit. Iridium showed us that price is everything and Globalstar's price per bit is not much cheaper, certainly not lower enough to enable affordable IP connections. LMDS shows promise but any terrestrial wireless project has higher infrastructure costs than nexgen satellite systems promise.
We all want the Internet, in our pocket, car, boat, house and office, and if we can get lots of it everywhere for $99 a month or less, we will buy it all day long. Throw in global long-distance voice and video for the same price and we will buy it all night long too.
The first companies to offer this will make the big bucks and my bet is nexgen satellite broadband IP networks (skybridge, Astrolink, Spaceway, Orion, S2COM, Teledesic) and a few terrestrial guys will get there, the rest will become lunch, or worse, mere fiber carriers (UPS) for the guys collecting the real money from the customers and wireless is where all the growth will be.
Invest wisely.
Peter Sterling
s2com.net |
