How billions can be made or lost. The Art of the Long View.
You are one of the biggest Asset Management companies in the world. And you keep buying towers by the billions. Like Brookfield Asset Management just Acquired 76,000 Towers in $2.5B India Deal.
Or you are MNOs that keep holding on to your towers like Safaricom PLC here in Kenya or Unitel in Angola are doing.
However, these companies overlook that Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) now have the full package. LEO's constellations are coming to eat the terrestrial ground-based mobile networks.
Maybe Safaricom and Unitel should consider selling their towers while the going is still good.
If you have any investment in tower companies. Keep your eyes opened.
The Kenyan boy is always right too early
Starlink sent and received texts over a 4G/LTE connection between mobile phones via its latest generation of satellites, called v2mini, for the first time this month, following similar projects from Amazon, Apple, AST SpaceMobile, Huawei, and Lynk Global. Starlink—the satellite constellation operated by SpaceX—will offer text messaging to subscribers of at least eight different mobile-network operators around the world and may offer voice and data coverage without the need for the ground terminals its customers now use in “coming years,” Starlink’s U.S. partner T-Mobile said in a statement.
The Starlink achievement is the latest example of how satellites and cellular base stations are converging. A handful of companies are exploiting cheaper satellite fabrication and launch costs, as well as adapting existing technologies such as beamforming, to bridge the several hundred kilometers between mobile phones and orbiting satellites. Among the many new wrinkles those companies have to iron out is the fact that for the first time, the towers themselves are the mobile component of the network: Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites move at tens of thousands of kilometers an hour, so they have little time to communicate with any one mobile phone on the Earth’s surface.
The companies competing to solve these problems have so far sent and received text messages on conventional phones via a commercial satellite (Huawei/China Telecom; Lynk Global; Apple/Globalstar) and performed voice and data calls over 5G via an experimental satellite (AST SpaceMobile) as IEEE Spectrum has reported. Investors have taken notice: Lynk Global is going public in a deal that values the company at up to US $800 million while AT&T, Google, and Vodafone recently invested in AST SpaceMobile, which has a market capitalization of $674.6 million.
spectrum.ieee.org |
