Slacker: "One downfall to that evidence is going to be more and more startups like Northcoast and MetroPCS getting funding for their copycat networks."
Well, I see that as a positive actually.. It means that someone else has done the math and has confirmed LWIN's math. So instead of Metro just doing a minimal buildout for 10 or 20 million, subaggregate, and selling spectrum out to the highest bidder. I think that the VC's think their actually may be money in growing a business like this? After all, if everyone thinks that LWIN will fail and their is no viable buisiness plan in this concept.. why are others starting to do it? And I am not too worried about that many other startups on the scale of LWIN at 73 million POP's. Or even their smaller brothers like Metro or Northcoast. After all, we have already done the hard part. And that is marketing, and subscriber acquisition.
However, the end game will might end up in some sort of Vodafone/Airtouch,Bell Atlantic, GTEish type merger IF they don't get gobbled up by the majors first.
"MetroPCS would be a really nice partner....they dont cover as many cities but they have 30MHz in each market."
I agree, but I am not as mesmerized by 30 Mhz as everyone else! Let's look back at Auciton 5. Nextwave purchased 30 Mhz in NYC. That is 11 Rx/Tx Carrier Pairs. So that was in the IS-95 days! So since then we have had IS-95B, 1XRT in CDMA capacity gains. So that is a double of a double.. So now you need 2.75 Carriers to do with 1X what you needed 11 carriers to do with IS 95A. Now we add on the next antenna diversity thing-a-ma-jig. And now we are down to 1.38 carriers in comparison to 1996 standards. Now we add "smart antennas" and .. Well you get the picture.. Let alone you run those numbers on the Auction 11 D,E,F Blocks 10 Mhz capacity in 1997 with only 3 carrier pairs.
Of course we are talking greater system use I understand.
However, The whole idea with CDMA is to do more with less spectrum. That's why I think we could do voice with a large part of the America with just 5 Mhz of unpaired spectrum. Much of Northcoasts coverage areas, and some of Metro's could easily be supported with 1 Rx/Tx carrier pair.. (except Minneapolis, Cincinitti, Cleveland, San Francisco, Miami, and Atlanta). That's why I think they should examine some sort of non - standard PCS spectrum. The majors have used a combination of cost of "unique technology" limitations, and the limited availability of spectrum within the "available technological economics of scale" base.
ZIF will eliminate those advantages. Especially, if one of your major investors can write the software for such a "unique technology" product. So the majors can't buy up every little wedge of 5 Mhz that becomes available in the next 10 years. Especially, with their subscriber growth coming down.
PCSTEL |
