Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : California Amplifier - 2 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: doormouse who wrote (1769)	8/19/1999 4:41:00 PM
From: marcos	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2267

/k1b0 - [if that is indeed your real name] - thanks for the inmarsat url - #reply-10713256 ... i only checked it out briefly, just enough to strongly suspect that the price schedule was likely to exceed my current capex budget of one million old pesos, or 87.63US$. So i will check it out more thoroughly later, when 1. my budget improves, and 2. the service is cheaper. Both these things will happen before long. There is a huge market out there for this stuff, and as the price improves the market gets huger. Well duh. But i wonder if we realise how much demand there is. My business revolves around real estate, and it's been a lifelong hobby to follow the price cycles and migration trends, very closely over many years in a couple of areas. Here is a theory i've developed; People put up with the crime and grime and lack of space in urban environments because of distance limitations on their ability to communicate with their fellows. Reduce the limitations and you reduce that need. Ford and Bell invented suburbia - if you could drive and phone, you didn't need to live downtown any more. Still - expanded though they are - there are still limitations. Cars need roads and phone service at a reasonable cost needs wires ... so far. Satellite internet could change this further, reduce the limitations a lot. Lately i'm negotiating on a little piece of land about twelve hundred km south of Louisiana, and kind of choking on the eight-fold increase in inflation-adjusted value in the five years in which i've been watching it. The price of one vacant suburban Greater Vancouver building lot you can spit across will now buy less than two incredibly fertile 100-hectare ranchos complete with homes, outbuildings, fences, cattle, and mango trees. Time to make a decision. But i can't spend a third or a half of the year there without a net connection - once you're wired you stay wired. At the moment there are four phones that i know of in the village of 2200 population, only one of which is a Larga Distancia pay phone. 36$NM/min to phone Canada, about $3.50US. No local-call ISP as of last winter. Everybody wants a phone, only the price stands in the way, and the price is still set by the Telmex monopoly. Maybe only wireless hookups will overcome this. A friend is looking into a net connection for the school, and not having much luck so far. It will come ... i would expect fifty or more homes in the village to be willing and able to pay a North American ISP price. Education for the kids is more and more recognised as important. There are tens of thousands of villages just like this one, in México alone. They're better off to skip the copper wire monopoly step, if possible, imho. Picking up a little momentum - quote.yahoo.com