Buba/Others,
Over the Thanksgiving day, I was talking to a few NXTL users from the New York area and the feedback was disturbing. There were talking of network difficulties both with the telephone and the direct connect features. According to them, many times during the day, the get either "Network trouble" when they use the direct connect or "no system available" when they use the phone. I asked them if they talked to NXTL reps. The answer was yes and the response has been varying with answers like ..."system is busy", "you went through blind spots" (exits 31 to 35 on the LIE), "your equipment need to be tested"...etc. Moreover, the problems have mushroomed over the past 6 months as the number of subscribers have increased.
Since I am not a technical person, I asked my cousin who is a network engineer and he speculated that these are symptoms of either limited bandwidth (Arnie, pay attention here if you are reading this message), or lack of complete coverage by towers/cellsites. I am more worried if the source of the problem is the first, because there is no short-term solution to the lack of bandwidth/channels (you may have seen another message I have posted about the fact that the very nature of iDEN requires more use of the existing bandwidth to take care of the fact that it uses non-contiguous channels). The second can be addressed with additional towers.
Are concerns like this causing the stock to be fading recently? Or is it the wait and see attitude of investors who, having pushed the stock from 12 to 30 this year, are now saying, "show me more - in terms of real earnings" before they bid the stock further (if this is the case, we should be seeing NXTL between 25 to 30 for the next 6 to 12 months). Feedback on the above and or additional information would be highly appreciated.
Overstaffed
Tavros |
