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To: Valueman who wrote (2435)	4/2/1998 5:56:00 PM
From: Dragonfly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10852

"Iridium capacity is 1.5 billion minutes per year. G* is 1 billion minutes per month." As far as I can tell this figure comes from multiplying the total capacity of the globalstar satellites and comparing it to the total capacity of the Iridium system (ie: using intersatellite links). I think that the reality of usage may be very different-- every channel on every sat will not be filled up at the same time. A truer measure would be switching capacity: how many calls can the system switch at a time... particularly in dense geographies. So, only localized demand spikes will be affected by this number. Furthermore, I'm having dificulty figureing out what this figure can be used for. My revenue estimates come from a calculation of the ramp up in demand. I really doubt you can say "well, Iridium has 1 billion minutes and G* has 12 billion minutes, so G* will make 12 times as much."-- this doesn't take into account the price differences, the usage patterns, the variations based on groundstation density (for both systems) and capacity, etc. So, what conclusions, if any, are you guys drawing from the 12 billion minute number? As a theoretical capacity, it only seems useful in the argument that CDMA is superior to TDMA. Dragonfly