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


To: Dragonfly who wrote (3943)4/17/1999 2:59:00 PM
From: marginmike  Respond to of 29987
 
Is it true that GSTRF is planing a second offering to raise funds. If so by whom and when?



To: Dragonfly who wrote (3943)4/17/1999 3:00:00 PM
From: Ok2Launch  Respond to of 29987
 
Re: Ocean coverage . . .

Globalstar has already announced that they will have coverage of the busy shipping lanes and fishing areas of the North Atlantic through a gateway in Iceland. They are also planning coverage in the Caribbean.
As for the Pacific . . . maybe they can negotiate a deal with the Pitcairn Island Telecommunications Corporation, although CEO Fletcher Christian the 12th is likely to strike a hard bargain.



To: Dragonfly who wrote (3943)4/17/1999 7:10:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 29987
 
*Ocean coverage* DF, to cover the oceans, there is no need for floating gateways. If you have a look at a globe, you'll see the oceans are littered with populated islands some of which have underocean fibre but all of which could send signals to geostationary satellites which is a pain because of obnoxious voice delay, but nevertheless, would provide a link. Not as good as Iridium, so from a competitive point of view, it would be a question of what proportion of calls would be diverted to geostationary links. The answer is, not a lot [for mobile people, though people living in remote ocean would always get a delay, so they'd prefer something closer such as Iridium, or ICO if they launch].

The gateway in Dubbo, which is about 400km from Sydney, can handle calls as far as New Zealand, so that's a useful yardstick. With gateways in Fiji, Auckland, Hawaii, New Caledonia, Tahiti, The Marshall Islands, Tokyo, Midway Island, Anchorage, Petropavlosk on Kamchatka, Pitcairn, Easter Island, Galapagos and all up the coast of North and South America, you would be hard pressed to find a spot of ocean without coverage. If you did, there would be almost nobody there, either on the ocean or in the air above.

Some of those places are on ocean fibre, especially the ones where the people are and that's the area which matters most, so they wouldn't get voice delay.

The cost of a gateway is about $15 million, so they will only be installed as demand warrants, which is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, but no real problem.

Similarly for the Atlantic and Indian oceans, there are plenty of islands to fill in ocean coverage. It's all just a question of justifying spending $15m. It doesn't take much to justify $15m so we can expect to see a fairly quick development to cover nearly everywhere.

In 10 years, given the slow rollout planned, there will still be some ocean gaps, but they will be few. If one is sailing in the South Pacific, there will be plenty of coverage so the cheap minute price will be more attractive than having coverage of places where the subscriber will never go.

I wouldn't bet that every bluewater sailor will have an Iridium phone. I bet they don't.

Maurice