I've used the Inmarsat phone, Goodfellow. No good-- latency, echo, like calling somebody on a 1960's Ma Bell phone. As for American Mobile-- I remember the company. What "constellation" did they launch? How many birds? And what of their latency and echo problem? And the marketing? All bad, Goodfellow. I was around back then. Or did you not know that satellite technology has gotten a little better since American Mobile and Inmasat-M?
So the issue comes down to this: do trawlers, shipping fleet customers, agricultural combines in various parts of Latin America-- combines which own endless acres of arable land-- want a service like Inmarsat with echos and 1 second delays (not half-second), when there are new technologies like Globalstar telephony without these failings, and which are lower in price/minute than the Inmarsat or jocular American Mobile system?
Sometimes I think it's good an "old" guy like me is on these boards. I remember when Nextel came out-- loaded with debt, a disaster, and the usual anti-tech attitude towards a new technology. Readers here remember what I wrote about Qualcom and Air Touch-- same story. I mean, really, wasn't Irwin Jabobs just doctoring those numbers for CDMA back in 1989? What a jihad was launched against him!
It is always good to have caution, to get all the info (as in now the case with Globalstar capacity-- seems we have enough info to make some reasonable assessment about BLS' claims of 12 billion minutes/year capacity).
I, however, detect two camps on this board-- the detractors (haters) and those willing to see beyond the smoke to the naked fact that 3 billion people have never used a phone.
3 billion people worldwide have never used a phone.
Now, are we all idiots, knaves, to believe that the satellite telephony companies are not going to be able to get telephony to 30 million of these people? Is someone who lives in Oman to be deprived of telephony because a signal sometimes fades, because of a "dropped call" off the bird? Oh, satellite phones don't work!!!! I mean, I read some of the comments on this board and you would think that Globalstar was meant only for Los Angeles and San Francisco, but it can have dropped calls, so talk the stock down, sell it and then short it.
Globalstar's target market is China, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and South Africa-- period. And China Telecom is the wild card.
Anyone here use the first model of the Motorola cell phone, which was the size of a radio? I did-- it didn't work. It was a joke, a farce. Even today cell phone coverage is not that good.
So, one asks oneself the question, managing size dollars, why the hatred-- and it is hatred-- for this telephony technology? Why not the patience that is required to see a profit through?
You have Qualcom-- now a $200 stock, Air Touch, now a $100 stock, Vodaphone, roughly $200, Daimler, now about $85 or so, and Alcatel, which has more money than the previous 4 companies combined probably--all these companies have thrown in with Globalstar. Did the CEOs of these companies just get in a room with Bernie Schwartz one day back in 1992 and say "Let's blow some smoke, Bernie, make up a story about wiring the globe, we'll give you $700 million between us 5 folks here, and let's wing it. Yeah, we know about rockets and all that, but let's put out a good pressline, let's do something new for a change. We're tired of raking in all this money in these boring day to day jobs-- let's get exciting. Let's b s everyone about satellite phones. "
Were they that stupid? Did they take a risk? Anyone here think that Qualcom thought it was taking a risk, when their CDMA technology was being used by the military for satellite telephony? Does anyone really think Daimler thought it was taking a risk in giving Globalstar some money and a price break in the components they were making for Alenia in Italy for the Globalst LEOs? Daimler? I don't think so. Daimler does not work that way.
So you have analysts on Wall Street saying-- the money for Iridium didn't come in fast enough. We know they spent $5 billion, Motorola though, and its partners are probably wrong and we are right, so give up on wiring the globe fiction and buy Double Click, buy Priceline.com. That's where the money is to be made. Oh-- you have never paid Priceline a cent for access to its webpage. Don't worry-- it is going to make a fortune."
Right. The day I have to pay for access to a webpage is the day I quit the internet.
Craig McCaw delivered a speech three years ago that I attended-- you know, the guy that put up $500 million of his own money into Teledesic. The guy that sold AT&T some cellular properites a few years back for a few billion. He talked about the elitists, those who thought that if current systems were not capable of getting knowledge and information to the rest of the world's people, those people who were not geographically favored to receive landlines, fiber, and the rest, were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and would have to stay in the 19th century. Too bad for them.
McCaw didn't accept that reasoning. Gates doesn't. Gilder doesn't. Schwartz doesn't. But the analysts on Wall Street, needing to make their clients a buck TODAY, say Iridium should be sold, it doesn't work, it has fade-- on and on. Don't let them work out their marketing problems, their distribution problems-- sell the stock!
And I have never owned one share of Iridium.
So analysts get embarrassed at a telecom conference when they ask the chairman of Vodaphone, after he discussed the Air Touch merger (I was at this conference), if Vodaphone would report earnings quarterly now instead of semi-annually. His response? "Why should we-- you didn't get Air Touch's stock price right for four years, and they reported quarterly. If you had correctly valued it, we would have had to pay much more for the company..."
And then we have our own troglodytes who visit this board. No vision, no belief in man's ingenuity, ability to overcome what 30 years ago was considered insurmountable. I saw on a Yahoo board tonight "LOR a scam" (msg 13870). The writer of course sold LOR before it dropped from $33, as he writes us, and calls LOR a "Ponzi scheme, a money sinkhole of monumental proportions... doomed to be outwitted and outmaneuvered by competitors".
Loral, as I wrote a few weeks ago, has now a DTH system, a Network system, an entire satellite manufacturing arm, and a developing global telephony system. Three years ago it had "squat". The poster on Yahoo who wrote this does not, however, refer to internet valuations as the wildest snake oil since the talk about endless battery life in the late 70s. Oh, yes-- there was a company to go listed that promised a battery that would last years. Don't know what happened to the company...
Like I said, it sometimes pays to have been on the Street a while.
And then there are various analysts who think because Loral is 6 months behind in Globalstar then everything that Loral says about its future businessplans should be held in doubt, if not outright disbelieved. "Schwartz lacks credibility. I don't believe him. He missed his launch schedule by three months on Telstar 6, Orion 3 is four months behind, Telstar 8 is not launching in '99-- it is launching in FY 2000. Schwartz can't be believed". These are comments of ladies and gents who have not worked a day in their lives (that includes me, too-- but at least I admit it-- pushing money is not working at construction, cancer cures, designs, airplane manufacturing, or launching satellites).
I started this narrative all because of Goodfellow's comments on the Inmarsat M phone, and Valueman's claims about its limitations (which I can personally verify), as well as his comments on American Mobile. I'll go into the Senator Bentsen mode one more time: I have used an Inmarsat phone-- it's no Globalstar. |
