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

To: Dragonfly who wrote (494)	3/15/1998 12:20:00 PM
From: Valueman	Respond to of 29987

Dragonfly: The delay issues have no answer at this moment. There will be a delay for every sat hop that an Iridium call makes--the on board processing will add to the delay. How much will that be? I have not heard--50 ms? 100ms? It all adds up. In regards to security, Iridium to Iridium will always be a very secure route, but I would guess a very rare event. Otherwise, everything else has to use a gateway to get to the final destination.

To: Dragonfly who wrote (494)	3/15/1998 3:19:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 29987

Dragonfly, thanks for the good comments. I quite seriously want to understand the advantages of Iridium. It's foolish to be ignorant of a competitor's advantages. As Valueman says, the space switching also introduces significant delay. But for both the systems, voice delay should be small enough to not be a worry. The calcuations I'd seen [from the Globalstar side] two or three years ago was that Iridium would have a slightly longer delay due to space switching. But I don't believe it to be a worry either way. But any delay is bad and should be minimized. True enough about the lead in time and the resulting mindshare. But slipstreaming can be a better strategy - especially where things change quickly such as the electronic gizzardry field. Iridium does the initial marketing and Globalstar walks in and picks up the customers due to lower price and better quality voice. Conjecture, and being first would normally be better. A lot of people wanting to make calls from the poles? Who? Polar bear hunters, Antarctic Scott Base sqatters, the odd boat, maybe even a few oil explorers. Sure, they would all buy Iridium. But I doubt the numbers would be more than 0.1% of Iridium's customers. Billing the caller is a VERY major advantage. I hate to think Globalstar is going to have handset holder paying. Eeekk!! In NZ, it is all caller pays. USA seems to be handset holder pays. I don't know why. If Globalstar doesn't get that right I think Iridium will get a huge lot of customers with caller paying. What's the story Mr Adrenaline or Readware? Does the caller pay in the Globalstar system? My understanding is that Globalstar customers will also have a single account no matter where they call from. This is one of my concerns on p--cing. Lots of rats and mice Globalstar agents can make a mess of pricing and customer relations unless there is a globalized system for keeping it on the straight and narrow. A monolithic system is better. On reliability, yes, Iridium has infinite redundancy because of the network - but only once a signal has got past the handset and the first satellite and only up until the last satellite before going back to the recipient handset. Globalstar has the same handset and initial satellite risk, with the added risk of a single gateway nearly everywhere. If the gateway is squashed, then failure. But once past the gateway, there is redundancy built into the Globalstar network by multipath optical fibre. I suppose there will be places where there is a single fibre away from the gateway so that is an added risk for Globalstar too. Dubbo in Australia, one of the first gateways, has 2 fibres leading from Dubbo into the telecosm. An island-based gateway in the Pacific won't have the luxury of two routes out. So yes, physical security is greater for Iridium. But as Globalstar develops there will be increasing redundancy and security. I don't know about the long distance call quality - it seems fine to me, but maybe in the USA it's different. [Geostationary calls of course are bad everywhere due to delay] In as much as Iridium does have North and South Pole customers, high security customers who cannot afford a very, very rare gateway squashing or cable digging, customers who just love the name Iridium, those who want a phone NOW, not some time when Globalstar gets into business, those who like to be seen to have the most expensive item for the snob value of it, yes, there are people who will buy. But those who want cheaper calls, [assuming they don't have to pay for incoming calls], better voice quality, GPS [does Iridium provide that?], better handsets with longer battery life, more secure calls due to cdmaOne coding, will buy Globalstar. For each customer who buys Iridium instead of Globalstar, that is a loss to Globalstar and that limits the potential of Globalstar. Being a Globalstar shareholder, I want to make sure Globalstar has the advantages I think it has. The need to criticize Iridium and make comparisons with Globalstar is a fact of competition. I also criticize the defects in Globalstar. Also, I don't like cliches like "there is room for both" etc. Maybe there is. For the first constellation. But one or other will gain market share unless there is something inherently advantageous to significant market segments which one or other systems can't provide. North Pole coverage is a real and total advantage for Iridium. But the other monopoly advantages it has escape me. Physical security is another - though hardly anyone would worry about that. On royalties for cdmaOne, yes Qualcomm has a monopoly only on certain intellectual property. It remains to be seen whether anyone can come up with a different method. Ericsson hope they can. They are primarily making that claim in my opinion because they wish to delay any migration from GSM, while they hope to get a cdma system working. Motorola didn't bother trying - they simply bought licenses from Qualcomm years ago. They will almost certainly stick with that. They are even having trouble making handsets go using that IPR, let alone developing their own. I think the royalties are secure, unless the USA via Janet Reno declares Qualcomm's patents to be a monopoly and confiscates them. Well, they are a monopoly [I mean the IPR, not Janet Reno though if she thought very deeply she would understand that she is the worst monopoly - the monopoly on power]. And the IPR can't be broken up as the Rockefeller and ATT businesses were. Okay, rant over, Phew, Hardly mentioned price. Maurice

To: Dragonfly who wrote (494)	3/15/1998 3:23:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29987

Dragonfly, thanks for the good comments. I quite seriously want to understand the advantages of Iridium. It's foolish to be ignorant of a competitor's advantages. As Valueman says, the space switching also introduces significant delay. But for both the systems, voice delay should be small enough to not be a worry. The calcuations I'd seen [from the Globalstar side] two or three years ago was that Iridium would have a slightly longer delay due to space switching. But I don't believe it to be a worry either way. But any delay is bad and should be minimized. True enough about the lead in time and the resulting mindshare. But slipstreaming can be a better strategy - especially where things change quickly such as the electronic gizzardry field. Iridium does the initial marketing and Globalstar walks in and picks up the customers due to lower price and better quality voice. Conjecture, and being first would normally be better. A lot of people wanting to make calls from the poles? Who? Polar bear hunters, Antarctic Scott Base sqatters, the odd boat, maybe even a few oil explorers. Sure, they would all buy Iridium. But I doubt the numbers would be more than 0.1% of Iridium's customers. Billing the caller is a VERY major advantage. I hate to think Globalstar is going to have handset holder paying. Eeekk!! In NZ, it is all caller pays. USA seems to be handset holder pays. I don't know why. If Globalstar doesn't get that right I think Iridium will get a huge lot of customers with caller paying. What's the story Mr Adrenaline or Readware? Does the caller pay in the Globalstar system? My understanding is that Globalstar customers will also have a single account no matter where they call from. This is one of my concerns on p--cing. Lots of rats and mice Globalstar agents can make a mess of pricing and customer relations unless there is a globalized system for keeping it on the straight and narrow. A monolithic system is better. On reliability, yes, Iridium has infinite redundancy because of the network - but only once a signal has got past the handset and the first satellite and only up until the last satellite before going back to the recipient handset. Globalstar has the same handset and initial satellite risk, with the added risk of a single gateway nearly everywhere. If the gateway is squashed, then failure. But once past the gateway, there is redundancy built into the Globalstar network by multipath optical fibre. I suppose there will be places where there is a single fibre away from the gateway so that is an added risk for Globalstar too. Dubbo in Australia, one of the first gateways, has 2 fibres leading from Dubbo into the telecosm. An island-based gateway in the Pacific won't have the luxury of two routes out. So yes, physical security is greater for Iridium. But as Globalstar develops there will be increasing redundancy and security. I don't know about the long distance call quality - it seems fine to me, but maybe in the USA it's different. [Geostationary calls of course are bad everywhere due to delay] In as much as Iridium does have North and South Pole customers, high security customers who cannot afford a very, very rare gateway squashing or cable digging, customers who just love the name Iridium, those who want a phone NOW, not some time when Globalstar gets into business, those who like to be seen to have the most expensive item for the snob value of it, yes, there are people who will buy. But those who want cheaper calls, [assuming they don't have to pay for incoming calls], better voice quality, GPS [does Iridium provide that?], better handsets with longer battery life, more secure calls due to cdmaOne coding, will buy Globalstar. For each customer who buys Iridium instead of Globalstar, that is a loss to Globalstar and that limits the potential of Globalstar. Being a Globalstar shareholder, I want to make sure Globalstar has the advantages I think it has. The need to criticize Iridium and make comparisons with Globalstar is a fact of competition. I also criticize the defects in Globalstar. Also, I don't like cliches like "there is room for both" etc. Maybe there is. For the first constellation. But one or other will gain market share in unless there is something inherently advantageous to significant market segments which one or other systems can't provide. North Pole coverage is a real and total advantage for Iridium. But the other monopoly advantages it has escapes me. Physical security is another - though hardly anyone would worry about that. On royalties for cdmaOne, yes Qualcomm has a monopoly only on certain intellectual property. It remains to be seen whether anyone can come up with a different method. Ericsson hope they can. They are primarily making that claim in my opinion because they wish to delay any migration from GSM, while they hope to get a cdma system working. Motorola didn't bother trying - they simply bought licenses from Qualcomm years ago. They will almost certainly stick with that. They are even having trouble making handsets go using that IPR, let alone developing their own. I think the royalties are secure, unless the USA via Janet Reno declares Qualcomm's patents to be a monopoly and confiscates them. Well, they are a monopoly [I mean the IPR, not Janet Reno though if she thought very deeply she would understand that she is the worst monopoly - the monopoly on power]. And the IPR can't be broken up. Okay, rant over, Phew, Hardly mentioned price. Maurice PS: Read this! From the Gilder stream: The full article can be found in the Wired archives at wired.com New Rules for the New Economy Twelve dependable principles for thriving in a turbulent world by Kevin Kelly The Digital Revolution gets all the headlines these days. But turning slowly beneath the fast-forward turbulence, steadily driving the gyrating cycles of cool technogadgets and gotta-haves, is a much more profound revolution - the Network Economy. It continues.....