*GEO Competition, Quality, price and who'll provide service* Valueman, Geostationary is certainly cheap. For fixed phones, I suppose there would be big demand at 1c per minute in poor areas even if one had to say 'over' each time one finished talking and you couldn't interrupt the other person due to the inherent and very horrible voice delays. For mobile, it wouldn't be much use due to shadows and handset size and you say higher cost. One would need to ensure a clear path to the single satellite providing the service. Also, landline prices can go a long way down yet - fibre minutes are near free, so landline would compete with GEO and win on quality.
Since Globalstar minutes should end up at about 10c per minute when Constellation2 is full, I don't think many people will prefer to save 10c per minute to have a very awkward conversation with a big Geo handset with a battery going flat due to the huge propagation distance [even if the GEO has a huge antenna which enables a smaller aerial and power output to be used]. For WWeb communications [images, internet, data, email etc] though, I suppose a GEO might come into use because the cost will be too high via Globalstar.
I'll keep my money on Globalstar for voice, not GEO. Globalstar will probably include some GEO later as part of the multilevel constellations [this all my theory of course].
Just as Qualcomm is negotiating with Ericy to sell WWeb technology, it would be good for Vodafone/AirTouch to sell minutes to Sprint and others to get the Globalstar system full. There is some price where it would make sense for both. They just need to do a good negotiation.
Meanwhile, Iridium spent hundreds of millions on advertising. Maybe the cheapest advertising would be to give the first billion minutes away free. If the second billion minutes was priced at 10c per minute, that would mean $100m out of pocket, but a VERY busy system, with huge handset demand and lots of free publicity as such a bargain was discussed and publicized all over the place.
We have 12bn minutes to sell in the first year, so there are a lot to get off the shelf in a short time.
If there are 100,000 handsets sold in the first month, and they talk 1000 minutes each per month just in Globalstar mode [30min per day], that would only be an 'opportunity cost' of $10m. What a bargain advertising program. So we could run the 'introductory special' promotion for months, with a total cost of not much compared with Iridium's advertising - which didn't get them many customers. So Iridium spent heaps on ads, sold few handsets and few minutes. Now they have few users and no money left for advertising [other than cutting prices]. Their free advertising will now read like this; "Loser LEO slashes prices to try to salvage a disaster". Globalstar's will read "Super-efficient LEO offers amazing deal on high quality phones. Will there be enough handsets to meet demand?"
Maurice
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From Loral thread:
Message 8193759
If we are invisible to the end user, they will not care which supplier their cellular provider chooses. In that scenario, price will inevitably dictate everything. Latency be damned!
This might be so except for the fact that our cellular providers are also partners in the G* LP. Thus, they will choose G* regardless of what the others are up to. Remember, Schwartz said the partners had invested $1.4 billion in this venture. They are likely to do their best to support it.
Price will be important in every scenario, but so will quality. The technology exists to put up a GEO sat that is mission specific--that is, it would be strictly dedicated to telephony. Such a beast is capable of 250 billionminutes of annual capacity. This could lead to service at a penny or two per minute, and a profitable business as well. The only quality issue there is latency. This is for a fixed system. The mobile GEOs have much lower capacity. My point is that price is NOT everything. If it was, this service would exist in the US right now offering penny per minute long distance. Hmmmm...maybe that is an idea....penny per minute with a little latency.....would people buy it? At a use rate of even 5% of capacity, at $.01/minute, this GEO would generate $125 million/year. Not bad! Maurice, you in? |
