Pierre, thanks for the comments, but qdog, you and John are making me more nervous. qdog says basically they ought to have solved the problem, but I don't believe they have. The only comments I've seen on pricing leave it to be sorted out in future. Oh, incidentally Larry, Iridium is between 5 and 7 years life according to a url in Iridium posts. Globalstar is at least 7. Must be due to the altitudes I suppose. Larry, how is Iridium handling this allocation of electricity as they have the same problem. Maybe they have grossly over-engineered and the batteries and solar panels are huge - hence the big, heavy satellites and the expensive call costs. I know that isn't the reason, but what is their answer?
But back to battery life. Not 12 hours on 12 off Pierre, the orbit is 100 minutes - bit more than that, but can't recall right now. So they are ripping around many times a day. They are only something less than 10 minutes in view which is why the tracking stations will be interesting = there are as many as five per site, so they will look like so many monsters looking around the sky.
Satellites are only in sunlight half the time since the rest of the time they are shielded from the sun by the earth - satellite night time lasting not quite an hour. Pierre, you better not be counting profits until we know that the batteries won't be flat and that competitors won't provide a better service.
It is a reasonable assumption that Globalstar people will have figured out a solution but until I KNOW they have, it is another dodgy area to think about. I've been around long enough to know that people, even experts, get things badly wrong. Incidentally, they are engineers and scientists rather than mass marketers, so it is easy to overlook things out of their field. Look at Ericsson. They decided that CDMA was a fizzer! Look at Apple, who thought that cloning was a bad thing.
The reason I got onto this one is that in talking to one of the earlier Globalstar designers, I ventured that New Zealand would get really cheap service because the satellites would be almost unused over the empty South Pacific. Nope, wrong Mqurice. The reason he cited was the need to conserve battery power for the trip over more populated areas. So from the horse's mouth, there is a problem.
The question is are they going to let subscribers decide the pricing or are they going to be like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and indulge the old 20th century fantasy of central planning as a solution to an infinitely variable human circumstance? Look where that idea took people!
The solar panels have to be big enough to fully charge the batteries during satellite day ready for the trip around the dark side. The batteries also need to enable power to be available during peaks and troughs in demand whenever they occur. Fortunately, most people use phones in daytime, so satellites happily have most power available when it is wanted. If people used phones only at night, they would have to have much bigger batteries.
A continuously running electron-volt auction is the way to handle it.
Sorry qdog, I need more than hope that they have empirical data. They don't. They wouldn't have a clue how many people will buy service at any particular price at what time of the day. Think about it John and Pierre. I'm not making up a problem for fun. Your splits and profits depend on Globalstar getting it right.
Mqurice |
