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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lml who wrote (2596)	12/15/1998 1:26:00 PM
From: RocketMan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Thanks, lml, but I think we are all sharing info and learning here, certainly I am. I am not a comm type, so I will let Dave and others answer your more technical questions. What are transponder? What do they do? A satellite is just a "bus" in the sky, filled with specific "payloads" to perform various tasks. For a comm satellite such as a Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS), the key payloads are repeaters that receive the uplinked signal from a ground station and retransmits it to earth to individual subscribers. This repeater is called a transponder, and carries a number of channels, anywhere between 4 and 10, depending on the desired image quality, compression, error correction, etc. Each transponder operates at a different frequency, and to avoid interference the FCC licenses the number and frequency of transponders at each orbital position, up to 32, in the same way they control ground broadcast stations. Since each transponder uses several hundred watts of power, there is a tradeoff between having one high power satellite with enough power to handle all your transponders, or several satellites with a few transponders each. Power = weight = cost in the space business, so the practice had been to spreading the licensed transponders among several satellites in one orbital slot, but now the trend seems to be to place more transponders per satellite. CONUS: DBS satellites are in geostationary orbit, 22,400 miles above the equator, so their orbital period matches the earth's rotation and they appear to hang over the same spot in the sky. To avoid interference, DBS satellites (which transmit in the 12.2 to 12.7 GHz bands) are spaced nine degrees apart, and assigned to specific orbital slots. Slots around 100 degrees west longitude are preferable because they are over the middle of the Continental United States (CONUS), and their signal can reach both coasts equally well. Slots towards the east or west coasts are used would require too much power to reach both coasts, and so it is better to focus them on broadcasts to whatever coast they are closer to. What are DBS1, 2, 3? Are these certain brand names of satellites designed for a particular purpose such as data delivery v. broadcast? These are just names for Hughes satellites. Other companies use different names for their satellites. Echostar uses E*I, II, III, and IV for their satellite names. Well, I better quit before I say something wrong... :-)

To: lml who wrote (2596)	12/15/1998 3:22:00 PM
From: DenverTechie	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

Franchisees normally build in penalties for cable companies who fail to deliver upgrades on time. Typically, a municipality will make franchise renewal dependant on several factors. Things like putting in an INET (institutional network), availability of high speed Internet access, but most importantly a requirement to upgrade to supply a certain number of channels by a certain date. Of course, the channel number leads to the specification of the upgrade bandwidth such as 550 MHz, 750 MHz, etc. Newest angle on this is placing a requirement for digital services in the renewal also. On paper, these franchising authorities can write in massive penalties for missing upgrade dates, or missing certain service availability dates. In reality, cable companies rarely actually ever pay penalties and if they do they are small slaps on the wrist compared to huge fines. Why? Because while the penalties are written in plain English in the main body of the renewal requirements, there are always loopholes written into the contracts by the lawyers. These include construction phase reviews where the cableco can revise its schedule based on certain "uncontrollable events" so the schedule slips without penalty, or the cableco can show materials shortage in the industry that affects their ability to finish on time, or hold up of construction permits by the very city that awarded the franchise (in which case the cable company is pardoned for the delay) and on and on, and so it goes. There are so many ways to avoid the penalties, in fact, that very few companies ever pay them, except in cases of gross negligence or ineptitude in building the upgrade.