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To: tero kuittinen who wrote (693)	6/17/1998 2:51:00 PM
From: Dragonfly	Respond to of 34857

Please don't take this as a flame, it is merely the tone that I use to discuss: 1. I've read from at least three sources that Iridium phones will have trouble working in cities, because buildings block transmission. I tend to trust independent journalists better than company PR. You should trust physics. In my experience, there is no difference between a "independant" journalist and a PR flack-- its just a question of who's PR they are repeating. Please explain to me why an Iridium phone in cell phone mode is going to work more poorly in buildings than any other cell phone? You are drawing a conclusion based on a piece of information taken out of context from the risks section of an SEC filing. You find me a large metallic building in the middle of an african desert and I will change my mind. 2.According to WSJ, Iridium phone will cost "close to 3'000 dollars". According to the Wall Street Journal in January 1997, Sun Microsystems bought Apple Computer. A statement they have never retracted. 3. .... Those numbers mean that the consortium will need to expand the sales beyond Hollywood agents and Silicon Valley CEO's. Its clear to me that you think this is just another Cell phone. Hollywood agents and Silicon Valley CEOs are not the target market for this system. The target market is people who spend significant amounts of time outside of terrestrial telephony service and/or are highly mobile when doing so. Every oceangoing vessel is the target market. Truck drivers in the USA is the target market. Anyone living or travelling to rural china, the yukon, rural australia, rural mexico, rural canada, rural france, rural tibet, rural india, africa, korea, mexico, brazil, viet nam, etc. Rural anywhere is the target market. There are tens of thousands of businessmen in Brazil alone, to whom paying $3,000 for an iridium phone will be a godsend-- because they have the money and its the only phone they can get. Let alone when they travel within their country and need to still communicate. This is not a cell phone we are talking about. It is a global phone. You seem confused on this point-- if you are in a city that is built up enough to block access to the satellites, then you are in an area with cell phone coverage and you don't need access to the satellites! They need customers willing to buy both a regular mobile phone for daily use and a satellite phone for travel. Actually, you can buy a version of the phone that comes in two parts- a light and small cell-phone and a base station that it plugs into. Use the cell phone in urban areas, and use the base station when you travel. Where's the market? Short Iridium if you want. If you never travel outside of cellphone coverage, I can understand our perspective. Many people are quite parochial about this. But just because you are not the market does not mean the market is not there. The fact that Iridium consortium was bickering about advertising strategies this spring shows that they are also wondering. Non-sequitor. Dragonfly