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Technology Stocks : IRID - Iridium World Communications IPO Announced! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DGS who wrote (1455)	3/19/1999 11:02:00 AM
From: Richard E. Warren	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2693

At our business we have a IRID telephone. The person said that it worked ok as long as he was not in his car. Why doesn't this work inside a car?

To: DGS who wrote (1455)	3/19/1999 1:17:00 PM
From: Geoff Goodfellow	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 2693

Dear DGS, 13K IRIDIUM subs by April is not surprising if you look at the history of two other satellite networks that offer like-services, the length of time in operation and their equipment and service prices. Inmarsat (http://www.inmarsat.org) and its (now 86) members who are generally Big Telcos and communications providers around the world started offering its "spot beam" Mini-M sub-notebook sized mobile satellite service in 4Q96 on the Inmarsat-3 GEO's. Today Mini-M has around ~40K subs worldwide (after 3.5 years of operation). A little history: the first provider of Mini-M service was Comsat (CQ:NYSE) with its Planet-1 terminal. The Mini-M terminals generally retail for around 3-4K USD and service costs around $2-3/min USD (with a monthly subscription fee of $0-75 USD) for fully terminated calls (irregardless of where you are calling FROM to where you are calling TO). You can see more detail on this service from a number of web sites such at mobiq.com (BT and Telenor), station12.com (NL Telecom), comsat.com (Comsat) or equipment dealers such as the folks at satphone.net (Satellite Warehouse). The other satellite provider to offer like-services would be American Mobile Satellite Corp ammobile.com (SKYC:NASDAQ) with a service area covering most of North America (CA, US, MX, et al + surrounding coast lines). As of their FY98 results announced on March 4 (http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/990304/va_america_1.html) they have signed up a total of 13K subs since they initated their SkyCell service a number of years ago (i don't have the exact one, but i think its around 3). SkyCell service costs around $1-2.50/min USD (with a monthly subscription fee of $0-175 USD with between 0 and 175 minutes included). You can check out the details from satphone.net. With this history, and the fact that the Inmarsat Planet-One/Mini-M service costs $2-3 USD a minute for similarly priced terminals i suspect Iridium will be lucky, very very luckly to sign up maybe 50K (fifty-thousand) subs this year. What i predict happening is that Iridiums $140M+ in advertising budget will raise the awareness level, but i perdict drive sales of the cheaper (and easier to understad $2-3 USD a min depending on rate plan) Planet-One/Mini-M service. I am sure there will be some users who won't give a hoot about the price of Iridiums service at $70/month and $2-10/min (the average call seems to cost around $6-7/min is frequently quoted in the press) with its complicated three level (within the same country, within the same region/zone and between regions/zones) call charging scheme (see project77.com and satphone.net for details). Best Regards, Geoff Goodfellow