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

To: go_globalstar who wrote (16860)	9/16/2000 8:40:17 PM
From: KyrosL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29987

There are no analog legs in G* phone to G* phone communication. G* gateways are connected to the PSTN via fiber. So, G* gateway to G* gateway is all fiber. Kyros

To: go_globalstar who wrote (16860)	9/16/2000 10:27:33 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 29987

GG, [not George Gotch or Globalstar Gang], the gateways are on fibre. So the only analogue part would be to a landline somewhere. Fibre is rapidly filling the main trunk lines. Costs are rapidly falling for round the world calls via fibre because fibre bandwidth is nearly free. This vindicates Globalstar's choice of terrestrial call processing, compared with Iridium's space-based computer effort though I can imagine lasers in space could eventually do better than land-based links which will always be vulnerable to damage. Multipath space laser links could be a good idea at some stage. Maybe for constellation 4. China for example could sail some boats around dragging ocean bottom fibre-ploughs with a sharp edge. That could cut out a lot of bandwidth at low cost in a short time and if they were disguised as fishing boats, they wouldn't even look suspicious. Somebody intent on destruction couldn't shoot more than a few satellites before some retribution came their way and a few missing satellites wouldn't hurt a big multipath constellation anyway. AirFiber airfiber.com is working on such stuff for terrestrial networks but they are for fixed links, not rapidly moving satellites which would require laser-aiming smarts. What AirFiber will do for Globalstar is enable people to bypass last mile blockages. Globalstar very badly needs to cut costs whereas terrestrial cellphone calls are no so cheap that a marginal minute is costing something like 10c on some price plans. A bit more saving there isn't such a big deal as people paying 10c a minute are not too dissuaded from making yakking calls by the price. $2.20 a minute is still a big disincentive [especially after paying $1000 just to hook up then another big bundle a month to stay hooked up]. Mqurice PS: I guess I'll just have to accept that the hillbillies are NOT from Pennysylvania. People keep pointing that out to me. I have no idea where I got that idea.