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

To: Darren DeNunzio who wrote (4373)	6/29/1999 3:00:00 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 12823

Hi Darren, You make some good points. I did not realize that the glass in an FO strand had quite that much effect on the transmission rate of a silly little thing like a photon. It's an engineering truth I will remember. Regarding "The Road Ahead", I read the original hard bound text. Two months after I finished it, (and felt I had learned something) the paperback version came out with all its revisions. Like, oh yeah, there's this thing called the Internet that might prove to be important. Mr. Gates has written (ghosted, dare we guess) a new book and I am certain of only one thing. It will be out of date before it is out of print. This makes me very curious: Since Teledesic will not sell bandwidth directly to the consumer, who are the uninitiated? I started visiting the Teledesic website in 1996 before they involved Boeing. Remember 842 birds? The plan was always to provide for individual users. Has this changed? I guess I didn't keep up on developments because the "pie in the sky' factor got too high. Have you been following the recent developments (or, rather, lack thereof) with MOT and Teledesic? Seems that some very sober (especially after the IRID catastrophe) engineers at MOT decided to pull the plug on Teledesic. So, Darren, go ahead and believe in Teledesic. But if a salesman should call and ask you to put money into this venture, ask him why none has been forthcoming from Gates and McCaw for an embarassingly long time....... Mi Dos Centavos, Ry

To: Darren DeNunzio who wrote (4373)	6/29/1999 12:47:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Thanks for those qualifications, Darren. And of course, you are correct about improved optical node switching times/speeds of the future (my bad, on that one).... and, the disparities which exist between propagation times for various media. Although, I think you stretched the significance of that one, which is only fair, since I did the same. Touche! --- The fact remains that the proposed Teledesic streams, if they ever come about, will be considerably lower in capacity than those afforded by terrestrial otpical modes (even those with a hybrid fiber/wireless foundation) at some point in time, and the ensuing traffic profiles that will be supported by fiber will not be supported in kind by those which are supported by the birds. This will create a virtual disconnect in the commuicability of services between one model and the other, IMO. I would even go so far as to suggest that tomorrow's proposed Teledesic flows will be regarded much the same way as today's cellular digital packet data services (CDPDs) and other wireless messaging platforms are, in comparison to other forms of transport which are afforded by more conventional, and ever increasing wireline media speeds. It's difficult for me to fathom how such a design, which was born out of influences which were clearly pre-DWDM/Internet - from a volume uptake perpective - can continue to be held valid and relevant, today, with the same level of esteme. We are talking, literally, about orders of magnitude of difference in payload delivery capabilities, here. I think that the best we could expect is to see some future grouping of specific application types that are supported in an optimal way by the LEOs, but we wont see anything (at least not anytime soon) that will even come close to resembling parity with terrestrial, optical-based pipes. All IMO, of course. BTW, I'm not twisting the discussion to suit my needs here, and I'm not even suggesting that you were arguing to the contrary about the parity issue (were you?). Rather, I'm stating an opinion, in closing out this post, on a matter that I think many investment folks tend to dwell over. And who can blame them, when the richest men in the world set out on a campaign to convince them of same. Regards, Frank Coluccio