Post on Usenet - Renting Globalstar - Is this getting popular?
This new Globalstar service sounds pretty good, but the handsets cost about $1200 and they rent for about $250/week plus a healthy markup for air time, according to one place on the web I found. Here's a tentative plan. Tell me what you think:
I could lease two or three phones from the middle of June through September, which is the busy season up here. Then I'd rent them to rafters, hikers, and horse packers at a rate of about $35 or $40 per day (requiring a hefty credit-card deposit, of course). My guess is that there would be a very strong demand for these things. There's not only the safety factor, but the stereotypical Middle Fork rafters are a well off, upper middle class white guy and his wife who doesn't want to be out of touch with the world for a week. Rafting parties are as many as 20 people, so splitting the cost of a handset rental over a week-long float would make the cost negligible.
If it works out, I could promote the service on a website for next year, book rentals well in advance, and lease as many phones as I need, I wasn't thinking about making money on this at first, but it seems like a pretty low-hassle enterprise that would work.
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