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

To: ebg51 who wrote (26127)	10/4/2006 12:45:41 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 29986

The $1bn for the new constellation seems reasonable to me. I've done extensive mathematical analysis using sophisticated boe algorithms in a megaflop supercomputer and find the cost should be $1.314159bn, including gateway upgrades and new gateways to fill in holes. My envelope was a small one though, and my supercomputer is getting old, so it's really only 1 significant figure [I just put all those others there to look really accurate] True, there has been inflation since 1999. But I think there will have been deflation in satellite building and launching. The end of the 1990s saw every man and his dog launching constellations to fill the sky with mobile cyberspace and a lot more besides. The order books must have been full and quoted prices high. Now, I dare say it's a hard-scrabble survival of the fittest contest. Prices will be lower. I dare say Globalstar Inc has had a bit of an investigation of what it will cost to replace the constellation. Also, they won't be launching so many, I guess. The first constellation gave robust coverage, with 48 satellites, though the satellites were fragile and several soon died. My guess is they'll aim at 40 as a good-enough solution. They can always add more if demand builds sufficiently. The first constellation included a lot of gateway funding. At $15 million a pop, that's about $300 million. They also had a building full of over-paid people. Now they have a skeleton staff. The SOCC and GOCC are already built. Maybe there will be some upgrading, relocating or something. Total cost of the first effort was about $3bn [I forget exactly] over several years. That was for everything. To partly replace the constellation could well be only $1.2 bn. I doubt that the satellite builders and rocket launchers are expecting to retire from stock options after a few months post graduate work. Reality has set in after the great Y2K celebrations and people are working for a living once again. Sure, there are Googlees doing well and some others, but things have settled down a lot. The whole idea of having gateways on the ground was easy upgrade. Iridium's computers in the sky can't be upgraded. I don't know what a gateway upgrade would cost, but with 25 gateways, unplugging one bunch of electronic gizzards and plugging in another shouldn't be more than $30 million. I agree with you that geostationary satellites are not good enough. There are already plenty of voice-delay geostationary services. But when demand is sufficient, orbits at 10,000 km and geostationary would fill in the oceans for total coverage. Voice delay is so nasty that I believe people would rather pay another 2c a minute to enjoy fast service and 2c is all it costs to build LEO minutes. Not many people want to suffer geostationary voice delay to save 2c or 1c a minute. Especially when the total cost is something like 50c a minute or [currently] $1 a minute. The great advantage of Globalstar over other satellite services is voice quality and no voice delay. With the newer CDMA technology, I guess that capacity of Globalstar can be greatly increased using 1xRTT, 1xEV-DO, Dora, and Dorb. When Globalstar was first designed, there was IS95 CDMA as the phone technology [or equivalent in LEO-land]. Things have come a long way since then. The ASICs that would be used now would be spectacularly better than those of a decade ago. So, maybe constellation capacity can be improved a lot with reduced spectrum allocation [or the same spectrum] Mqurice