Rajala, I'm just not sure where you are coming from (both figuratively and literally).
It seems to me, though, that you exhibit "addytood" as we call it in Philadelphia, rather than making a coherent, educated argument.
There are a few things that seem obvious to me that perhaps are not so obvious to you. Here's a short list.
1. Cost structure "A". For large portions of the world, it has never been economically viable to install wired telephone service. Similarly, in thinly populated and travelled areas, the phone companies will not install cellular towers. Even in the United States, especially since telephone service was deregulated, this is so, and getting more so. There are just too many other more productive things to do with money. I suspect this is true elsewhere, but with government owned telephonopolies it may not be.
2. Cost structure "B". GlobalStar's cost structure is such that they can afford to undercut any other satellite telephony scheme with similar performance (latency and audio quality) that is currently operational or likely to be any time soon. All things being equal (and, thank goodness, they rarely are, because the products I sell are far from the least expensive) most people are likely to buy the less expensive product.
3. Phone size. The portable analog phone I bought twelve years ago was about the size of an unabridged dictionary. After a while, I hard-wired mine into my car (and then another car and then another). This phone was considerably larger than the available Iridium phone and both larger and more expensive than all three GlobalStar phones. As they say, size matters; but, as Maria Muldaur sang a long time ago in a quite different context, "It ain't the meat, it's the motion." In other words, if you are traveling where there is no cellular service, that fancy 2 gram phone with 3 year battery life is just so much dead parrot, even if it also plays solitaire and pac-man.
4. Location, location, and location. See #3
5. Cultural bias. I got it. You got it. All God's children got it. We just have different flavors. I like the idea of being able to make a call from anywhere to anywhere.
6. It is not "either/or." It is "and." All GlobalStar phones are multi-mode phones. GlobalStar phones all come with built-in GSM or CDMA. The phones' default mode is cellular. So, if you are standing in the middle of Picadilly Circus, you don't have to worry about where the satellites are. But, if you are boating on Lake Windermere, you also don't have to worry about where the cellular towers are.
7. Together, people can afford things they may not be able to afford individually. People can share things. When I was very young, many of our neighbors had a "party line" phone, which meant they shared a single phone line. Now, between our home and offices, my wife and I are by ourselves responsible for the existence of eleven telephone lines, including five voice numbers, two fax numbers, two pagers, and two cellular phones. (Believe it or not, I have actually memorized all the numbers!) In much of the world, not only is this not economical, it is not possible at any price. A GlobalStar phone booth in the middle of a rural town in Africa, China, or India (to pick just three) brings them a whole lot closer to their friends and relatives who emigrated to somewhere in the wired world.
I would only add that Iridium's problems do give me pause. I am shocked (really!) that they could spend all that money getting the so-called hard part done (launching the satellites) and so completely bugger up the so-called easy stuff (marketing and sales). It is a classic engineer's mistake, of course. Dilbert is not the only one who mistakenly thinks all marketing people spend their days drinking champagne and eating sandwiches made from endangered waterfowl. (Some do, of course, but not all. The rest of us just aspire to that.) Like most anything else, it is very very difficult to do marketing very very well.
I expect that GlobalStar and it's partners have learned a lot and will avoid most of the mistakes Iridium has made. Of course, GlobalStar almost certainly will make a large number brand-new, never-before-seen mistakes of their own, too.
With any luck at all, none of them will be fatal, as I am afraid Iridium's have been. |
