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Technology Stocks : METRICOM - Wireless Data Communications -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gary Batroff who wrote (666)	3/25/1998 1:40:00 PM
From: Javelyn Bjoli	Respond to of 3376

Maybe since it is the government, they can get a longer-term deal, like decades instead of years? The government, not being a particularly for-profit agency, is probably also less likely to renegotiate if MCOM has a lot of success (to grab more money from them).

To: Gary Batroff who wrote (666)	3/25/1998 1:53:00 PM
From: Daniel Johnson	Respond to of 3376

In Seattle, much of the electricity and phone distribution is underground. That leaves light poles for the radios.

To: Gary Batroff who wrote (666)	4/7/1998 6:26:00 PM
From: david waitt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3376

Gary Asked,... <Why does Metricom use streetlights to mount their radios? Couldn't power poles or telephone poles be used? It would seem these poles would be more numerous and maybe easier to get access to...> I am sure that there are several answers to this question, I do not claim to know them all since I am in Engineering and not "right of way" or "operations" ( the guys who handle deployment) One reason I do know is that we have a very quick and easy method of getting power from the streetlight that we can do ourselves. If the radio is on a power pole ( and several of them are, BTW...I was riding around with a deployment person last week for a while and we had to locate 20 radios that were ALL on power poles) we have to have a electric company go to that installation and apply power to the radio. This costs us several extra $$$ that we would not have to pay for a streetlight installation. david david@metricom.com