<The Worldwide service is priced from 99 cents a minute in Western Europe to $4.99 a minute in parts of Africa, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, Nextel said. > If Nextel is serious about those prices, it shows that Globalstar is not too far away at $1.50 a minute in USA [or $1 a minute in Australia]. All in US$!!
Roaming charges are still high for terrestrial.
Pricing is going to be a LOT of fun!! Let the price wars begin.
Meanwhile, Globalstar is readying Constellation2 as we speak. Okay, not installing the satellites on the rocket, but certainly way into the design phase.
It will be a separately designed, but backward compatible, system [bear in mind this is me making it up, not inside information]. So the old handsets will be able to work on the new one. But the new handsets won't work on the old.
The new constellation would be launched all at once [over a period of a year or so] because you can't just pop another satellite into the existing constellation. There aren't the gateways to track it and it would make the constellation 'lumpy'. It would also be uneconomic from a contruction point of view.
Better to plan a whole constellation with total coverage which would integrate nicely with the previous one. That way you'd get a satellite production line humming, rockets, gatways all running well and cheaply.
They'd also want to make it fly lower to reduce transmission delays even more, reduce handset power output [and satellite], improve link budgets or whatever the jargon is. That would mean lots of gateways to be built. Each satellite needs a satellite dish to track it. I suppose about 800 km would be a good height. They won't bump into 747s or mountains at that altitude.
The cost of minutes in the second constellation would be about 2c a minute, thanks to rapidly reducing launch costs, less design and production cost, use of existing facilities such as fibre from the gateways, SOCC and GOCC [satellite operating control centre and gateway operating control centre]. Same board of directors, same marketing people etc.
The new satellites would have big antennae so that they could see a weak signal from a handset. So that would allow a less monstrous aerial even at the forfeiture of some energy efficiency in the handset to provide subscriber convenience. With methanol fuel-cell batteries, battery life won't be an issue. Weak signals are good for lots of reasons. Less spectrum contamination being an important one. Satellites are always power-hungry and power on a satellite is expensive, so the less the better.
Handsets will be smaller, with great new ASICs, maybe with HDR to enable WWeb access. The earlier reported 384kbps for Constellation2 seems too slow. It would be really good to have HDR enabled! Handsets will be cheap too! They don't inherently cost much more than the plastic and solder, the rest being IPR and development costs plus profits. When 10s of millions are being produced each year [yes, 10s of millions] the cost of Globalstar handsets will be way down. QUALCOMM will make a fortune [from ASICs, royalties and handset sales]!! Telit and Ericy should do okay too.
Constellation2 will make for lumpiness, since capacity will at least double in a short time. Prices will need to drop to fill it quickly. Constellation3 will only add 30% extra and Constellation4 only 20% extra, so price per minute will not jump up and down so much as extra capacity is added.
Eventually, there will be a continuous production line of satellites and rockets and the constant replenishment which Dave Wiggins described. But not for the first 3 constellations.
All just my opinion, based on guesswork.
Comments and corrections welcome.
Maurice |
