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

To: Dragonfly who wrote (527)	3/27/1998 4:22:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29987

As you say Dragonfly, with a full system and tons of dough rolling in...where's the problem? Give me such a problem would say all businesses. Fair enough. But the Iridium customers can have a problem; gridlock. No wonder Iridium is keen to put in more earth stations rather than the original one. Apart from political considerations in countries which like to keep their populations at heel, there is the need to reduce space switching which will increase the call carrying capacity of Iridium. To explain. If the Iridium system was full, then another caller couldn't get connected. That would happen because all pathways in the Iridium system would be full. This would happen on a 24 hour basis, like clockwork, as the busiest area on earth went into its peak calling period. Their signals would spread across all pathways, filling the system entirely. As this area moved back into quietness, all pathways would become available until 24 hours later. You suggested that certain regions might be full in Iridium, and this wouldn't affect other areas. But calls would divert from the full satellites to the ones with space avaiable until all pathways were full. Globalstar won't have this advantage and will have localized full areas and frustrated callers, but empty other areas. In a way, this is very convenient for Iridium, because Iridium could adjust prices in a very predictable way to maintain some spare capacity so another call could always connect - though there would be variations from day to day and week to week. The peak calling time would remain fairly constant. But if one area started buying heaps of handsets, the peak calling time would shift. For example, suppose initially demand is huge in the USA, peak time would be say 4 pm. But if China bought big in 6 years time, the peak period for Iridium would shift to 4 pm in China. So peak time in USA would become midnight or some such. Quite the reverse of normal expecations of peak time. As you say, such a problem is a good one to have. But demand management would be essential so callers wouldn't have dead periods of "no service available". That was the problem I meant. Although Iridium would have muliple earth gateways, that won't affect the system being fully blocked. It will just increase capacity by reducing the space switching legs of the call journey. Haven't you got pricing back to front? High prices initially, then lower prices you said. Shouldn't it be low prices initially, to build a customer base, then higher prices once the system is nearly full? Your high-priced-initially strategy would hand the customers to Globalstar on a plate. I hope they adopt that strategy. Maurice PS: I suppose if there is very high useage in one area in Iridium, then you could get locally full satellites and space available on others, but that shouldn't be the case I expect.