Here are a bunch of interesting posts from the Fool, mostly Readware's, but a few others as well....VERY LONG
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Subject: Re: Misc. emails
Date: Wed, Mar 18, 1998 2:19 AM
From: Readware
Message-id: <1998031802193600.VAA26800@ladder01.news.aol.com>
If the question is on ViaSat: you find out if their DAMA is going to be used for a satellite provider simply by finding out if their DAMA is being designed for the frequencies that the GEO of the satcom provider will be using. Right now their DAMA is only UHF compatible, so far as I know. I s'pose the easiest way to find out is by calling the Carlsbad Campus and discussing with their engineering (commercial, not military) people for what frequencies
a current DAMA project of theirs is being designed. If it fits into the frequencies of a GEO whose frequencies you know, you have a match. Nothing recondite in that.
As for the question on G* as a reseller: if I recall correctly, not every reseller covers all of the areas where G* will be servicing. For some reason I recall that G* in Canada will be a reseller of satcom time. Not all of Canada-- certainly not in eastern Canada. I think it was in the address of G* Canada last year where I read that. And I thought I remembered they were seeking to be a reseller in certain areas of the Phillipines. The issue is not
important, though. I believe the end result is that G* will be a reseller in areas where their telco partners may not be present and yet there is service that is required. Being a reseller means simply doing the billing and ground connecting through a telco that is not in the telco group now, as well as providing the satcom time.
G* does not need a central service number like Iridium, since the local telcos will handle domestic satcom usage time. So I do not see an advantage in Iridium's having a world office in Virginia for all customers over G*'s business plan. The reason Iridium provides for the polar regions is not because they thought they were going to have customers there. Iridium was designed for the polar regions (which G* is not) so that it could get US military
traffic. Everyone knows that. And yes I am aware that Iridium has already begun construction on satellites for the second generation-- but they are doing that because the deamnd for their services do not exist, right?
Subject: Re: Back to our Regulary Scheduled Programming
Date: Thu, Mar 19, 1998 3:17 PM
From: Valuer
Message-id: <1998031915175800.KAA11613@ladder01.news.aol.com>
The 2 L-Star sats and M2A sat are still in limbo. SE Asian reports indicate that Loral is negotiating with ABCN to purchase the L-Star system. I do not know if this includes the 4 orbital slots or not. L-Star 1 & 2 were to be co-located at one slot, leaving three open. It is also interesting to note that these sats were designed so that they could park up in space for up to 2 years. Loral could buy, launch, and wait if need be. They would have
Ku-band access to India if they did purchase L-Star, but the Europe*Star system also has a beam centered on India. Alcatel has said that 80% of Europe*Star's capacity will handle DTH broadcasting, the other 20% high rate data and multimedia(sounds like a good place for C*!). Europe*Star has five narrow footprints covering Europe, South Africa, the Arabian Penninsula, India, and portions of SE Asia. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Shinewatra Satellite, a Thailand based sat operator(Thaicom) posted absolutely awful results the other day. They are in trouble. If one could sort through the corrupt ownerships, government deals, etc., there are probably some awesome assets to be had in Asia right now in the satellite world.
I think the ONSI meeting is tomorrow.
As far as a partner for C*, I look at Hughes for a preview. They started DirecPC(sat downlink, regular ISP for uplink) in a way that a person could use any ISP. They now offer a "package deal" with a specific ISP so you get one bill, etc. Perhaps that is what C* will do, or perhaps they will start with a partnership with a nationwide ISP--I do not know.
Subject: Re: meteor message for readware from SI thread
Date: Fri, Mar 20, 1998 4:39 PM
From: Readware
Message-id: <1998032016391601.LAA22275@ladder01.news.aol.com>
Interesting note there-- however, an asteroid hit Jupiter last year. Would that the citizens of Jupiter had only a comet hit them. The asteroid impact was the size of planet earth. If that was not known by the writer so be it. One can't know everything.
As for graviatational oscillations and pull on orbits-- only slight changes in gravitational forces are needed to cause astrophyical predictions on the future orbits of various bodies to be uninformative. Most such calculations are useless for predictive purposes.
Subject: Price Weakness
Date: Fri, Mar 20, 1998 5:07 PM
From: Readware
Message-id: <1998032017072000.MAA25882@ladder01.news.aol.com>
Apparently, and I say apparently, as has occurred in the past 18 months from time to time with LOR common, a non-US corporate holder of LOR intends to divest itself very shortly of its LOR position in a trade. So the price weakness. We shall see.
Subject: Broadband and (speed of) Light:Alcatel-Loral
Date: Fri, Mar 20, 1998 11:19 PM
From: Readware
Message-id: <1998032023192600.SAA23202@ladder03.news.aol.com>
For those interested in satcom broadband technologies, the problems, the resolutions, and investment standpoint:
As is well enough known, the commercial application of satcom technologies for broadband, for the promise of "Gigabit in the Sky", derives from NASA's ACTS and the US MILSTAR efforts of the late 1980s. ACTS' spotbeam efficiencies-- breaking up large broadcast cells into smaller honeycombed ones-- provided for the Ka band breakthrough that in the early 1980s was considered improbable. With the high frequencies (28GHz uplink, 18 downlink) of Ka Band
comes a decreased power need, and reduced antenna costs. Recent advances now enable subdivision of frequencies among these cells and their re-use in non-adjacent cells. To this advance was Ronald Maehl of Loral's Cyberstar referring in his recent comments at a New York satellite conference on "frequency re-use" as a cost per byte economizer. Spotbeam frequency re-use makes symmetric links commercially feasible. MILSTAR, of course, has now
opened up new broadband initiatives for V-Band and water band. Already Huges StarLynx and SpaceCast, Loral Cyberpath, Motorola M-Star among others have filed for V-Band access to the FCC.
The question now, as satcom telephony seems to be a resolved issue among original sceptics, is whether satcom technologies are viable for broadband in the presence of fiber? The constellations proposed by Lockheed, Motorola-Marconi, Hughes, and Teledsic will require an aggregate bandwidth of some 3 terabits/second-- the ground equivalent of 2 million T1 lines. Satellite powers, indeed, are moving with dispatch in their plans for broadband
provisions. Some estimates put their broadband services at 10% of the 2005 market, with 400 broadband satellites in orbit, and 1300 satellites to have Ka Band delivery alone by that year. Such robust numbers need to be viewed carefully. Still, satcoms, the advocates say, will move "beyond the trunks". This is the meaning of their role as "providing the last mile". Bandwidth on demand will be a commercial reality, that is, in areas where fiber is
commercially prohibitive. Stauncher advocates see satcom broadband services closer to home. Both Teledesic and Celestri argue for "speed of light" preference in markets just outside the urban areas in the US and Europe. To Celestri that is a market commanding $70 billion in revenues a decade from now. Skybridge has mentioned $34 billion by 2004, 05.
Investors, however, want to know what system architecture will win out? And when? A brief survey of the 1988 difficulties and advantages of GEOs and LEOs are probably, then, in order. And given the "disadvantages" what is being done to mitigate or eliminate them, And, more importantly, who is doing it?
Lockheed Martin's Astrolink is a GEO system exclusively. GEOs tend to be bandwidth constricted because of their altitude, and latency laden. Because TCP packets cannot travel faster than the speed of light, they experience a "delay" effect. GEO roundtrip latency can approximate almost a half-second delay-- about 10 times the latency of a typical Los Angeles to New York fiber hop. LEOs, the advocates of GEOs will respond, experience "jitters"
(variations in transmission delay and packet re-ordering), making them not invulnerable at all to the latency charge. While large memory buffers in earth stations can "equilibrate" this latency (make the delay constant, thus minimize its effect), the "buffer" technology does not serve email traffic. Buffers require large packets of bytes, while email is small. Inclined LEO orbital patterns, being pursued by Celestri and Skybridge,
greatly offset the "jitters" problem-- but at the cost of nonpolar coverage. Additionally, a large constellation of LEOs is required to minimize these "jitters"-- 48 will not do. GEOs will provide coverage, on the other hand, at both poles. LEO "jitters" are especially acute, the GEO advocates argue, if in internet packeting TCP cannot distinguish latency from a normal delay transmission. That is an issue yet to be resolved technologically, and will
have to be revisited as satcom providers come closer to actual broadband servicing.
LEOs with satellite to satellite links have the tricky problem, GEO advocates hold, of absolutely precise beaming, a problem not as coarse for GEOs. And LEOs, because of their satellite to satellite handoff, are not as ATM-ready as GEOs are. The advantages to LEOs, though, is that effective hand-offs provide for greater speed than the cumbersome footprint controls hounding a GEO. LEOs, i.e., are more nimble in delivery because of the relative
smallness of their footprint. The GEO advocates response is their's is a simpler topology, with far less routing complexity than required for 64 LEOs.
It is the problem of latency though that the GEO versus LEO advocates press. For this reason a hybrid system-- a combination of GEOs and LEOs-- has been offered. GEOs are sufficient to answer non-latency sensitive bandwidth demands-- such as broadcast and IP multicasting (a one-to-many delivery of data, which conserves dramatically on bandwidth). While "spoofing" (acknowledging a TCP transmission prior to actual reception) is being developed along
finer lines for GEOs, there does not appear to be sufficient advance yet in the technology. LEOs then, it is believed, are more sufficient to videoconferencing and telephony/voice. They "mimick" fiber more closely.
There are two systems being developed, then, with the "compromise" of Low Earth Orbiting satellites and Geostationary. They are those of Motorola Marconi Celestri and Alcatel-Loral Skybridge. While Loral has only a GEO broadband system envisioned within Loral named Cyberstar, Skybridge is a Ku-band 64 LEO, 4 (tentative) GEO system that will use a bent pipe architecture throughout the fleet for broadband
delivery worldwide by 2002. Unlike Celestri, which will stay with the satellite interlink of its Iridium effort, Skybridge follows the Loral model of keeping as much technology on the ground as the system allows. This is a risk reducing strategy, and economizes on cost so as to appeal to a broader market. Celestri's interlink strategy, we do not believe, provides the same economic advantages. The Skybridge
Ku band is a distinct advantage for rain fade issues, even as microwave developments continue to reduce that even more. As conceived now, Skybridge must resolve the 20 millisecond delay its constellation will incur by its requirements to avoid GEO interference. We think that the above described memory "buffers" provide a long solution for that.
Loral's management has frequently spoken of Loral's intention of providing seamless services worldwide for information-intensive systems. A Loral-Alcatel collaboration in Skybridge could therefore provide non-fiber accessible areas of the globe with telephony through Globalstar, broadcast and IP multicasting through Cyberstar and Europe*Star, internet/videoconferencing on demand through
Skybridge, and Ku/Ka band (8 Ka transponders proposed) access through Orion. V-band protocols will need to be addressed once their usage becomes plainer. (Hughes, so far, has been the most vocal about V band).
As the technological issues of "latency", "jitters", and "spoofing" become increasingly resolved, the investor in satcom technologies sees an area of investment-- the broadband synergies of Alcatel-Loral-- as a seamless system of information delivery. While the various tehnological issues are debated throughout the industry, as technological advantages are seen in increasing industry consolidation-- which we expect to accelerate-- the
narrowband issue of telephony seems to moving towards its goal of providing global telephony access.The broadband market-- that same model of converting cold-war technologies to commercial use (with the military always at a one-leap advantage, of course)-- begins to emerge as an investable one. We think that the current satcom telephony market may provide the clue, the model, for investors as to the likelihood of success for satcom providers in
broadband.
More than commercial resolution of the larger satcom technological issues of broadband will be required for investor interest. Successful pricing (the beginning of return on equity) needs to be established. The T1 model is the one satcom providers face in the corporate market. In high density areas, the economics of fiber make T1 superior in every sense to satcom. It is in areas outside of urban traffic where pricing models for satcom providers
begin to take shape. Satcom providers must identify markets where time usage of the service has a billing advanatge over continual service billing. Also, satcom providers will want to software in their pricing automatically to the end user so as to conserve on personnel costs.
Increased beam efficiencies-- "frequency re-use"-- as a manifold cost reducer of internet bytes-- is, however, the principal for "return on equity" that will attract investor attention. Those efficiencies, linked to technological advances in the issues we mentioned above, are what satcom investors need to address as Skybridge and Celestri make their debut in late 1998, early 1999 for investor monies from the capital markets.
Subject: Re: Price Weakness
Date: Fri, Mar 20, 1998 11:36 PM
From: Readware
Message-id: <1998032023364901.SAA26189@ladder03.news.aol.com>
There was no options activity in LOR today sufficient to indicate any "triple witching" effect, much less any "options expiration effect", on LOR common.
From a triple witching standpoint, the stock should have been up in price-- the market rose over 100 points.
As for particular satellite issues: CD Radio was up in price, G* and Iridium World were up in price-- PanAmSat was down because of a Merrill Lynch downgrade. There was no trend in the satellite company stocks then.
We shall see shortly, now that the Orion merger is complete, if talk of a non-US corporate holder of LOR possibly divesting its shares accounted for LOR's recent price weakness, and hedge fund shorting yesterday and today.
Subject: Re: meteor message for readware from SI thread
Date: Sat, Mar 21, 1998 5:34 PM
From: MMorrisMM
Message-id: <1998032117344100.MAA03037@ladder01.news.aol.com>
Readware: <<Interesting note there-- however, an asteroid hit Jupiter last year. Would that the citizens of Jupiter had only a comet hit them. The asteroid impact was the size of planet earth.>>
I am not aware of any major asteroid impact on Jupiter last year. Perhaps you could point to a reference for this claim. Perhaps you are mistaken. The comet Shoemaker-Levi, however, certainly did strike that planet.
Of course, you must be perfectly aware that it was the impact scar on the visible cloud cover on Jupiter which was, "the size of the planet earth", whether we are talking about the comet impact(s) or some asteroid impact which somehow eluded my attention. There are no asteroids the size of planet earth careening around the solar system. Unfortunately, your remark could be easily misinterpreted to make this implication.
<<As for graviatational oscillations and pull on orbits-- only slight changes in gravitational forces are needed to cause astrophyical predictions on the future orbits of various bodies to be uninformative. Most such calculations are useless for predictive purposes. >>
"Most"? What do you mean, "most"? Should I throw out my tide tables? If I wonder when the comet Haley will come back to perihelion again, should I just throw up my hands and wait? Do satellites just go any ol' way, due to unpredictable perturbations arising from comet impacts on Jupiter? Sure, we can't precisely predict the moment of moonrise a billion years out. Is that what you mean by "most"?
Mark
Subject: Re: meteor message for readware from SI thread
Date: Sat, Mar 21, 1998 7:29 PM
From: Readware
Message-id: <1998032119292100.OAA21459@ladder01.news.aol.com>
I was addressing astrophysical calculations on the effect of anomalous movements of various bodies in the solar system as predictive of future orbits for small compounds (read-- meteors), And yes, one should dismiss them as holding probative value in such cases.
The very comet you cite for Jupiter-- not one astronomer-- (amateur or professional) foresaw the devestating imact it would have. Should they not have if astrophysical calculations have such probity? And my comment on the impact on Jupiter in 1997 was that the impact left a devestation on Jupiter the size of the planet earth-- not that the asteroid was the size of the planet earth. Obviously, if it was the size of the planet earth, it would be a
planet, and not an asteroid.
I am not aware of any academic astrophysicist who will state that orbital movements can be predicted with an accuracy that would indicate what force various meteors might have on manmade satellites-- especially when various orbital movements of the planets are wobbling as a result of impacts previously unforeseen. Changes in gravitational oscillation have compounding effects the greater the ellipsis. (Here the ellipsis would be referring to the
orbital path of a mteror shower). Impacts on planets have consequences on future calculations. I know no astrophysicist who would deny that. And God knows I know enough astrophysicists.
A meteor the size of the Santa Monica beach here would reduce a LEO node to plasma in an instant if it hit it-- it would totally destroy it. Someone here posted that he thought there would be less probability of damage for a LEO than a GEO in the presence of a metoer shower.
If you can through your calculations tell me exactly what effect a meteor shower will have this year-- not a billions years out, atime span you for some reason think I was making reference to (do you think I am an idiot?)-- on any of the fleets in orbit-- any-- please post them. And then when the year is over let's take a look and see if your calclulations had predictive value. Then you can make the determination as to whether you should throw your
tidetables in the wastebasket. My initial inclination is to say you should. Your calculations will not predict anything that comes to pass.
Subject: Re: meteor message for readware from SI thread
Date: Mon, Mar 23, 1998 2:27 AM
From: MMorrisMM
Message-id: <1998032302274100.VAA10578@ladder01.news.aol.com>
Readware: <<I was addressing astrophysical calculations on the effect of anomalous movements of various bodies in the solar system as predictive of future orbits for small compounds (read-- meteors), And yes, one should dismiss them as holding probative value in such cases. >>
You are using technical terms in a way that I, a Caltech graduate, find difficult to decipher. My best efforts translation: "I was addressing the effect of unpredictable orbital perturbations of the planets on smaller bodies like meteors. And yes, one should dismiss them as lacking any proven value."
<<The very comet you cite for Jupiter-- not one astronomer-- (amateur or professional) foresaw the devestating imact it would have. Should they not have if astrophysical calculations have such probity?>>
Orbital calculations are based on physics understood since Newton. Predictions concerning the the atmospheric effects on Jupiter of high energy impacts are another kettle of fish altogether. For related reasons, one can predict moonrise in a month without being able to predict the weather.
<<I am not aware of any academic astrophysicist who will state that orbital movements can be predicted with an accuracy that would indicate what force various meteors might have on manmade satellites-- especially when various orbital movements of the planets are wobbling as a result of impacts previously unforeseen.>>
The gravitational effects are certainly negligable. The impact effects for any specific meteor are unpredictable in any practical sense. However, the statistics of impact damage by streams of dust intersected by the earth's orbit would seem to be calculable. We may not have all the necessary data now, but it's not hard to imagine the steps necessary to acquire the necessary data.
<<(do you think I am an idiot?)>>
No. Do you think I'm an idiot? Was Shoemaker-Levi a comet or an asteroid? What I think is that you are at times patronizing, and you wave your hands very widely indeed. You are such a valuable resource that I am tempted, like all the other scientific literati following this board, to indulge you. In this particular instance, you reached my personal limit.
<<If you can through your calculations tell me exactly what effect a meteor shower will have this year on any of the fleets in orbit-- any-- please post them. >>
The effort to predict damage statistics from the Leonid micrometeor stream to satellites seems like a very reasonable scientific enterprise. I will leave it to the experts.
I will drop this now. I thank you very sincerely for your huge and irreplacable contribution to this board.
Later,
Mark
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