To: Souze who wrote (14025 ) 7/3/2000 7:04:27 PM From: Maurice Winn Respond to Souze, here is why Douche-Bag Jon [as well as me and others] pricked up our ears:... I just talked to a representative from GMPCS, my G* service provider. As of July 16 (or 15 or 17, memory fades), Globalstar will be the service provider of air time. GMPCS will sell G* phones but not minutes. At the customer's option, an existing contract will continue to be serviced by GMPCS or transfered to Globalstar. But once the contract ends, GMPCS will no longer sell minutes. >globalstar.com as well as other stuff such as agreements with Qualcomm and service providers. That's a privately held limited partnership owned by Loral, QUALCOMM, Vodafone, China Telecom and a few others. Globalstar LP wholesales minutes to service providers who own gateways, licences and stuff in different countries where they have exclusive rights to supply service [as long as they meet their sales quotas]. Globalstar LP lives in San Jose with their staff, SOCC and GOCC, hiding behind great big security systems in Lockheed grounds. Bernie hangs out in Noo Yawk, where they keep the money - he raided Lockheed's piggy bank the other day, as agreed, but it still made them squawk. Now GLP has lots of money to get right through Y2K. globalstarusa.com is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vodafone, which bought AirTouch and a bunch of other stuff. Vodafone is the biggest service provider for Globalstar [though China Telecom has rights to sell to 1.2bn people in China] which is more than Vodafone has rights to. Globalstar USA lets GMPCS and swarms of other distributors sell phones and service in the USA and has now changed their arrangement with GMPCS, which I guess is a prelude to a big-time USA pricing and marketing launch when the current pathetic 'special deal' expires in a week or two.
