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

To: djane who wrote (4234)	4/27/1999 4:06:00 PM
From: John Stichnoth	Respond to of 29987

How does all this play into overall capacity? Beats the sht out of me.* LOL--After studying his six point mini-dissertation, to get to that! So, from 70 billion theoretical free circuit minutes (2800 x 48 x 365 x 24 x 60), G* settled on 11 billion as "practical" limitation, taking into account some unnamed factors. RMiehle and Maurice and this AR2 fellow have enumerated many possible factors, however: Battery charge time, use of 2-3 sats simultaneously on one call, time over water.... It does appear that we are left with some multiple above breakeven or breakeven with cash for replacement satellites (eg., 900MM or 1.8MM minutes, at 40 cents per minute). If G can generate and control use so that one-sixth of available capacity (1.8/11 BN) is used, then G can get to the second generation. To get to 1.8 bn minutes, with 1.7 million subscribers (from CC?), they need each phone to generate 88 minutes per month on average. Some would do substantially more than that: fixed, where no other phone is available, and storeowner is selling availaility to a village; and handsets, where some will do a lot but suburban sandsets will generate occasional or "emergency" minutes only. (Another way they stated it was 7.5MM subscribers max, generating 10-12BN minutes per year as system capacity; times 14% to get to second generation equals 122 minutes per subscriber per month, yields about the same $600 million revenue per year.) Of course, to get to 1.7 million subscribers, they have to produce 2 million "user terminals"--ie., phones! That means ramping up to 120,000 phones per month very quickly. The money will be generated by users who have the phone as their primary mobile or fixed phone. Are there a lot of those? Farmers outside the range of a cell? Remote villages? Miners (when above ground)? Forest Rangers? How many people live in Alaska outside of Anchorage and Fairbanks? Revenues may depend on this "line of site" idea. Do people really have to be outside, vis-a-vis irid? Or, can they make calls from inside their homes or cars? Will the weak satellite signal be sufficient to get through a car or tractor roof? Will it be strong enough to get through a typical wooden rural structure?--which is a lot different from a metal-enclosed office building or factory. But, the key appears to be getting available handsets initially into high-use users' hands.