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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (4277)	6/22/1999 12:32:00 AM
From: ftth	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 12823

Hi Frank, if I grab my purist broadbander cap with the “red circle with a line through the V.90” emblem and put it on, I'd agree with most of your points. In the purist's role, I'd call it a panic reaction to squandered past broadband opportunities and the only reason one would invest in AOL because of this venture is because the stock certificates might someday be a valuable collectors item<gg>. It's a less than marginal attempted solution to broadband nirvana that doesn't scale to large numbers of unique multi-megabit, time-sensitive bi-directional data streams. It will have a very short useful lifetime which will quite possibly be over by the time it's fully deployed. The problem with that view is I have a hard time believing they don't know all these things limitation-wise. They know their secret AOL-sphere user data inside out, and they must see a system deployment which can exploit it. They can't possibly believe that the types of services and content being talked about for cable broadband can be deployed under this satellite model. So they must have a different vision of the services and content they will offer based on their REAL subscriber data (rather than rosey prognostications of what might be, as all other providers are forced to do). Perhaps it's not fair to equate it to the proclaimations of what cable broadband will be like (someday) and how this wont be the same and/or inferior in every way. With a mere 3% of their subscriber base subscribing to this service, they'd already have as many subscribers as the whole cable broadband camp worldwide. I think it's safe to say that the take rate among AOL subscribers will be higher than the take rate of cable data vs. homes passed because ALL AOL users already are online. I just can't believe they intend to deploy the so-called advanced services and their low-latency requirements because it doesn't make sense. We're forcing this all-in-one bundled provider label on them when they clearly can't strive for that. That doesn't mean, however, that some other model might prove very successful. The models we often use as baseline measuring posts are still dreams themselves, so we don't really know those models are properly targeted anyway. dh