Well, I don't know much about Nextel that I didn't learn over the last two days, skimming old 10Qs.
FWIW, my impression is that it had significant performance issues early on, following which it conducted a "regional rollout" analogous to G*s. Only instead of rolling out country by country (continent by continent), it gradually added metropolitan areas of the US, and, more recently, foreign destinations. Nextel has spent enormous sums (2-3X G* capex, I believe) developing a footprint much smaller than G*s, and has fierce competition in all its markets. To its credit, it's raised a lot of money in the financial markets, and grown sales at a very impressive rate. Whether and to what extent it becomes profitable next year remains to be seen, I suppose.
I can see two significant advantages Nextel has over G* (well, three, if you count Craig McCaw): (1) it's in charge of its own destiny as far as marketing and retailing the product and (2) it's entering a well defined commodity market, where the demand and market price is well understood. G*'s service is essentially new, and it's struggling to find the market clearing price for its service at the same time it has to find financing.
In that respect, I disagree with Mq: I would have preferred that Irid and G* duked it out in the marketplace, in the hope that the market clearing price would have been found faster. In the present situation, with G* really having no competitor outside the boundaries of terrestrial wireless, the SPs are likely to continue lowering prices veeeeerrry slowly. |
