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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Globalstar Telecommunications Limited GSAT -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Geoff Goodfellow who wrote (3728)	4/4/1999 12:19:00 PM
From: RMiethe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29987

I have seen various Inmarsat ads in different paper media also. I imagine when I was referring in my previous post to regional partners and Inmarsat's lack thereof I should have been quite specific and said instead regional cellular partners along the lines of Vodaphone, Air Touch, and the very like. Somehow I don't think British Telecom fits that description. A large faux pas on my part, nevertheless. An outright inaccuracy, which I hope I have now corrected. In the end, however, Inmarsat is not mass-oriented. It has major quality problems that Globalstar is designed to avoid, and I have seen the size of its new "lap top"phones and the cumbersome antenna. Who would ever really purchase them? Just my opinion, of course. As for Inmarsat's marketing, let me go back to that: I have never seen in this country (which is my only source of information) one Inmarsat Global phone advertisement on American television. In the meantime I see TV ads for Air Touch 1, AT&T cellular, Sprint PCS and even for SkyTel paging. That is what I mean by marketing which is why in one post I said "the marketing's the thing" (paraphrasing the Earle of Shaftesbury, William Shakespeare). I have talked with various satellite industry folks about Inmarsat, and they have given me the foundation for paraphrasing that US Vice Presidential candidate which I did in my prior post, "Inmarsat is no Globalstar". This is all opinion of course. I certainly don't know more than anyone else. Certainly Iridium mass advertised on TV in 20 second ads. But they had no phones, and the phones they had also cost too much. And their billing structure! Talk about a labrynthian pricing. The average customer wants "cents per minute" uniformity period. You did not get that with Iridium. If Air Touch and Vodaphone are smart, they'll do Globalstar that way and forget a torturously graduated pricing system. As I understand it, Air Touch is pretty much committed to that already. One price throughout Canada and the US off the Globalstar system, no matter where the call is made. But some posters here can check that out, to confirm. Maybe I am wrong. We can discuss and go back and forth till the end of eternity, so to speak ambiguously, about Inmarsat, Iridium, Globalstar, Ellipso, ICO, Hughes' GEO-sat telephony, and on and on and on. No one, and I have in mind especially Wall Street analysts whose research we keep where experience shows it belongs, knows at all what the outcome of all this will be 48 months from now. There is simply too much microscopic examination of every lint and hair on this satellite telephony beast. Every day the slightest tweak brings about reactions totally out of proportion to the event that spawned it. Tales out of school, different rumors, worries magnified without waiting for the evidence to come in, the "Hang him" mentality much like in the Old Frontier West before the jury had time to "deliberate", the gross investment inability to let a system and business develop its market because "I want a high price right now". I cringe when I think we have people in our business who say "We took it out and shot it" referring to a stock. What's that supposed to mean? This is "literacy", this is "intelligence"? As for me, I am going back to managing money, easing on out of these SI boards, and let the Globalstar matter take care of itself. As I wrote in a previous post, 3 billion people without phones-- somehow, some way, it just seems to me that maybe three or four million of those folks will use a satellite telephone system. They can't all be poor, all living in huts, all out of work. all illiterate, all living in the stone age. Even as I write this post, a Sprint PCS ad just came on the Television (not HDTV, I admit)-- still haven't seen Inmarsat just yet do the same. And yes, Sprint does have the phone.