Maurice-
I posted some facts about Iridiums plans that are worth noting, and in your response you ask me for the advantages in the Iridium system. I'm not sure why, I hope its because you really want to hear them, so here they are:
-- Propagation: you got it backwards, Iridium has a distinct advantage. If you make a call from a G* phone in the US to a G* customer in China you have your signal going up to the satellite, down to the gateway, into the LD network, across the globe to China, back up to another satellite and back down to the reciever. That's 4 space to earth hops, and a lot of international switching-- a lot of latency. In the iridium system you would have only two earth to space hops, and a lot less latency. This will be important to some people.
-- The technology, at this stage, is more proven and the constellation is halfway there. Additionally, they have the mindshare, and the lead. Time to market will not give them a monopoly, but is very useful for getting marketshare-- and I beleive they will be able to defend it. Globalstar will grow the market, more than it will steal customers from Iridium.
-- Yes, actually, there are a lot of people who want to call both of the poles, and so coverage there is actually relevant (particularly to them!)
-- Being able to bill the caller is a distinct competitive advantage (in the US you pay for your calls on a cell phone even if you didn't originate them.) There's a non-trivial amount of work that goes into billing software to support this feature. (I've heard that %90 of the cost of long distance is the billing costs- if this is true, then a space based communications system should incure some significant billing expenses-- will G* be doing it also, or will they opt for saving money by not supporting billing the originator?)
-- Iridium provides a monolithic solution. This will be very useful to companies who have lots of field personnel, who don't want to deal with 30-60 different phone companies. One bill from one company for all their calls.
-- In my analysis, the Iridium system will be more reliable, because if there is a problem with terrestrial systems (besides natural disasters, such things as bugs, or fiber optic cables being cut, etc,) the service will still be there-- they always have an alternate route to another gateway, or directly to the end customer.... and as a subset of this, the quality may be significantly better because they avoid the use of the existing long distance network (which is not what it could be.)
In the long run, I think Globalstar will have more customers and make more money than Iridium1. However, just because I'm long on Loral and G* (more Loral) does not mean I haven't invested in Iridium and I'm confident that it will be successful and find a lucurative market. You seem concerned as to what's "best" from the perspective of the usage type *you* want-- but, I'm sure you realize there are a large number of segments of the market, and some quite lucurative ones, that have different needs. Why the need to tear down Iridium? Its a perfectly good system, and its success does not limit the potential of Globalstar in any way.
Dragonfly |
