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Technology Stocks : Loral Space & Communications -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Valueman who wrote (2388)	3/31/1998 3:33:00 PM
From: Dragonfly	Respond to of 10852

"Is this a thinly veiled slam???" No, I meant it literally. If you said that those were the numbers you came up with, I would give it as much weight as the reports readware cited. In actuality, depending on your reasons for the numbers, I might give it more weight. Such estimates are very interesting to hear, and fun to play with as ideas of what the market might look like, but I recommend basing investment decisions on one's own manufactured numbers. :) Dragonfly

To: Valueman who wrote (2388)	3/31/1998 5:50:00 PM
From: dougjn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10852

Valueman, re: Cyberstar. Do you have any idea whether uplink via Globalstar is feasible? Here's what I mean. My understanding is that Cyberstar will not itself allow uplinks from individual PC's (i.e., the mouse clicks of surfing, or the limited text in post messages, e-mail or not, such as this one.) At least not for several years, until the LEO constellation has launched. Before then, it does uplinks though landline connections through an ISP, which then routes downlinks through Cyberstar. Now my understanding of CDMA is that it is a very appropriate technology for charging by the byte for IP transmissions. That is, Code Division only uses up code space when its got something to code, and doesn't just automatically assign a time slice (Time Division TDMA) every microsec or so in case some voice or something else (data) is squirting through. (I would suppose there would have to be some minimal amount of coded data that goes through every once in a while just to say we are connected.) Now this is important because we all know that the usual way of using the Web is that the vast majority of time is spent reading (or waiting to read L.) Then the occasional mouse click which sends a bit of html code requesting a new page. Very occasionally a few thousand bytes of e-mail. And rarely, rarely, the uplink of a substantial document. Soooo. There that NY Times guy is in Telecosmically poor (but oil rich) Kazakstan. He doesn't just want to phone his clients in NYC or Moscow. He wants to surf too, man. So he sets up his dish, plugs the Adaptec CardSlot version of their downlink card into his Micron XKE super laptop, and plugs the serial port connector into his Globalstar sat phone. (But by the mighty Qualcomm.) Because he dials a special datalink phone number (you know, Globalstar's dedicated ISP), he gets charged a per byte charge for the uplink portion. There's another (very different and very cheap) per byte charge by Cyberstar for the downlink side. (Globalstar has some sort of voice detecting filter to chuck out IP Voice telephony would be cheats.) Big additional markets for two Loral companies. And not incidentally, I could do the same thing off the aft railing of my sail boat, while cruising the Bay Islands of Belize. Or wherever. What you think???