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Technology Stocks : Winstar Comm. (WCII) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Trey McAtee who wrote (3115)	12/10/1997 7:03:00 PM
From: SteveG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12468

[chat] <no, i am really 23.> OK, I'll bite. But then, humor my intrigue: You are an undergrad at UTA studying _________ and you have also been working as a trader/researcher at _________ (which is related to "GroupNetwork" by __________) for _________ years. Your background/experience in trading/technology is _________. <i tihnk i will give the company a call and see what PMP method they are using. shoudl prove interesting...> I'll be interested in your findings, and if I get the chance, may follow-up myself. Regards- Steve

To: Trey McAtee who wrote (3115)	12/12/1997 12:17:00 PM
From: Harley Scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12468

I guess I'm a little behind on this discussion, but a lot of questions were raised by Trey and others about 38GHz. Here's the understanding I've had since I started tracking WCII. Somebody stop me if I've got it wrong: Why is WinStar focused on 38 gig? Because that's where they own the licenses, stupid! (just kidding) How is WinStar using it to provide communications? Line of site from building to building (as an alternative to fiber optic cables), ultimately to connect all buildings back to WinStar's network switching centers using a building hub structure. The wireless component is NOT for inside the building. Would a higher slice of spectrum be better? As has been pointed out on this thread, there are some benefits that come with higher frequencies, but oxygen notwithstanding (I got lost in that discussion), if you got much higher than 38GHz, then the effective distances between the network hub buildings and the customer buildings would have to be shorter and shorter, thereby increasing the difficulty of deployment while eliminating some of the cost advantages vs. using fiber optics. With 38 GHz, WinStar can place the dishes 1.5 miles away from each other (I think this is true whether using point-point or point-multipoint). In a big city, that allows a WinStar hub building to "see" a fairly large number of customer buildings. What's really the advantage of point-multipoint? I'm pretty sure the main advantage is that fewer dishes can be used to achieve the same thing. i.e., lower costs. Another advantage might be that it could make it easier to convince a building owner to let you use their building as a "hub site" on your network. With point-point, if a single hub building "sees" 40 buildings, then you've got to put 40 dishes on that roof. With point-multipoint, you might only need one dish on each side of the hub building. Is 38GHz better than 28GHz? Teligent is at 28GHz and has the identical business plan. For practical purposes, they seem pretty similar to me. Since 28GHz is a lower frequency, their signal travels farther than WinStar's, but if Teligent wants 99.999% reliability in the rain, they may have to deploy the dishes just as close to each other as WinStar does (I'm not sure on this point). I know that PCom says you can deploy their 38GHz dishes 5 miles apart from each other, but I remember WinStar saying that they don't install them more than 1.5 miles apart. It also makes sense that at the lower frequency, you get more dispersion, so the 28GHz dishes can't be deployed as close to each other (this won't be an issue unless the spectrum use really explodes). To me, the most salient thing about these specific frequencies is that in each case the FCC has restricted it's use and set it aside for this purpose (a good thing), and in each case most of it is controlled by a single company (as an investor, I like that too).