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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Globalstar Telecommunications Limited GSAT -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rocket Scientist who wrote (8557)	12/6/1999 12:35:00 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29987

Bernie Schwartz lost his bet! He owes a dinner. Globalstar was NOT ready in September. Or October. Or November. Or December. The constellation is not yet complete. The satellites are not in position so the service providers can say that they have not yet got a fully functional system to use. The gateways are NOT in operation anywhere and nobody on planet earth can yet wander up to a store, buy a Globalstar phone, sign up with a service provider and start making calls. So any way we measure it, the system is not ready. Bernie owes a dinner. An announcement at Telecom99 is not the start of operations. A sale to real, live, walking, talking, customer is the start of operations. It must be that the service providers are avoiding the start of a ticking clock. Nothing else makes sense. The constellation is plenty good enough to sell service and has been for a couple of months provided customers were told that there would be the occasional hole in the sky. The FBI is a convenient excuse. The number of crooks the FBI will catch on Globalstar does NOT justify even a day delay in start of service in the USA. The FBI is being criminally negligent in their duty of protection. MORE people will die from lack of service and inability to call for help than will be saved by the catching of criminals by having listening by the FBI made available. Anyway, how come it is illegal to have a private conversation in the land of the free and brave? Do you all have to wear little lapel microphones all day everyday so the FBI can listen in to you? If not, why not? The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and the vigilance is slipping rapidly. Maurice

To: Rocket Scientist who wrote (8557)	12/6/1999 2:37:00 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 29987

*ICO - Here it comes* Looks as though Craig McCaw and Subhash Chandra are going to take a big chunk, bail it out, put more in and make it happen. Message 12195508 That means Globalstar will have competition. The good news is that the first ICO constellation will be funded only because of the huge capital write-off. So a second constellation won't be justified unless ICO makes a huge success of the first and the full capital cost of a new constellation is justified by market demand. The bad news is that McCaw will be able to price the first constellation minutes at cruelly competitive prices, slashing Globalstar prices to ribbons. A good lead time is being rapidly whittled away. Yet another copy of Iridium's failure mode. For all the boasting of learning from Iridium, there seems not to have been a lot learned. There is a lead. It should be used by getting a LOT of customers in a frenzy, not a liesurely yawn into picking up the odd one here and there, sometime in the first half of 2000. True, there won't be many customer complaints about service and that is a good point. Even Iridium is going to survive by the look of it, but at least they have only 1bn minutes to sell and they will definitely not be building a second constellation once the first decomposes. I suppose I should be glad that ICO will start operation because New Zealand will get satellite service. Globalstar's attitude to marginal gateways is that they will not be built until demand elsewhere has grown to such an extent that roaming will justify the construction of marginal gateways. Meanwhile, 12bn minutes per year, a billion a month, 30,000,000 a day, 1 million an hour, which is half a million dollars an hour wholesale or $1.5m per hour retail are being lost forever. That's a very, very large financial loss, or opportunity cost if you prefer. Maybe a few customer complaints per hour would be okay if we could get that $1.5m. Maurice