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

To: axial who wrote (11376)	6/11/2001 12:59:15 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 12823

$2 a day? Way too optimistic an assumption.... Hi Jim, Latest figures that I have is that around 50% of the human population exists on less than $1 per day, and 50% of the human population has never made a phone call, let alone searched the Web. Scott McNealy was fond of quoting the latter statistic as a rah-rah boosterism-blather speaking point about bit-rates ballooning. Bill Gates recently broke ranks with the true tech religion brethren and suggested these dollar-a-day folks have a lot more pressing needs than bandwidth. Are you arguing the timeline, or the realization? My comment was aimed at the heart of the speculative fever that grips players who fall in love with a story, who always buy into the IPOs and the new, new thing, because they're going to be the wave of the future and who almost invariably are taken advantage of by the wire houses and smart money who know that year in and year out, well over 92% of all IPOs lose money for those foolish enough to get in early and try to do a buy and hold. To think, for instance, that BBFW is a magic bullet for the last mile is a Don Quixote delusion. It's clear that the aesthetic requirements of the suburbs, i.e. lots of lovely tall foliage (er,trees), precludes the possibility that radios will ever be more than a mere niche solution for the last mile. Or are you implying that we are on the eve of a depression? I'd say I'm being sober about the prospects. Since absolutely everyone in a position of authority is denying that a depression is possible, one can only conclude that it would be an extreme outlier that would require the confluence of what, by analogy, might be called a 100 year-economic-flood. Since other prognosticators, like for instance the weather scientists covering the Mississippi drainage have experienced the embarassment of at least 3 100-year floods in the last decade, I'd wonder about the quality of the prognosticators in the dismal science, where the forecasting track record is, to say the least, not terribly different from that of the weatherman. I'm sanguine that the economy has great resiliency. I'm also convinced that no one could have predicted in early 1999, the state of the telecom industry today, as an example of an industry that is set to go through some wrenching hard times for the next few years. The thing that worries me, in addition to RobS' astute comment about capitalization, is whether the market really wants all this promised connectivity, and how close we already are to saturation. Level headed analysts who aren't pimping their product to the equipment vendors have noted that well over 90% of all US internet nodes connect via DUN, and that there simply is no rush for this to change, looking at the macro picture. Broadband, such as it were, via DSL or CableModem, is really a very small percentage of the overall market. And if predictions that the ILECs intend to raise DSL prices everytime they squash competition in any service area, I see scant possibility for a gold rush there. The cable industry is constrained both by its capital structure and the fact that it is running pretty much flat out in terms of its technical abilities to build infrastructure, so there is not going to be any great growth there. Besides which, the low hanging fruit has been being harvested for years now, and the new builds on HFC will be going into less and less desireable locations, financially speaking. Ray

To: axial who wrote (11376)	6/11/2001 5:17:33 PM
From: willcousa	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

In my own limited case I just bought a hotel room on the net for less than I can call the hotel itself and get it for (I tried to do just that). New pricing gives an extra break if you will pay for the room up front. I bought a rental car from a site that showed me the prices of each major agency and I took the cheapest. I got a break for taking an E ticket over the net for airfare. I can buy a lot of electronics for less on the net. Have a large Borders and Barnes & Noble nearby. Love to browse them. I can order things from them and wait forever or get them from Amazon right away and for less. These are, IMO, the first baby steps.