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Technology Stocks : George Gilder - Forbes ASAP
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To: Joe Wagner who wrote (1155)4/4/1999 12:49:00 PM
From: Bill Fischofer  Read Replies (3) of 5853
 
Satellite Second Thoughts

The recent lackluster performance of IRIDF and GSTRF has prompted me to ask the folks here to discuss just how important satellites are likely to be in the future of the telecosm.

Except for communications at sea (where INMARSAT and others already operate), I have to question just how large a market there is for being able to make phone calls in the middle of the gobi desert. With T and others finally getting serious about providing real roaming for cellphone users it seems to me that the occassions when a cellphone subscriber will find themselves outside of their calling area are going to diminish very rapidly over the next five years. This means that the satellite companies will be fighting for an ever-smaller number of potential subscribers who happen to travel frequently to underserved areas. While satellites will undoubtedly remain important in the carrier market, the notion that millions of individual subscribers will be "talking to the sky" seems a lot less convincing than it may have a few years ago.

Second, given the rapid pace of technology change, isn't anybody concerned that the "huge" bandwidth provided by these systems will seem little more than a useless trickle by the time the systems are deployed? If it takes 3-5 years to fully deploy a satellite system and terrestrial bandwidth is growing by hundreds (if not thousands) of percent per year, then there is serious risk that these systems will be obsolete before they are ever completed. Just how much will folks pay for 9600-baud service these days?
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