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

To: JGoren who wrote (4459)	5/4/1999 9:29:00 PM
From: Drew Williams	Respond to of 29987

Orion 3 launched. Second stage currently coasting after its second burn.

To: JGoren who wrote (4459)	5/4/1999 10:04:00 PM
From: Drew Williams	Respond to of 29987

JGoren, I can confirm the badmouthing Sprint got around Philadelphia when service started. The negative attitude was easy to understand, because the buildout was far from adequate, and there were way too many holes for the system to be generally useful in the suburbs. I'm told those problems are largely behind them. I am of mixed mind as to the whole question of pricing the handsets and minutes. On one hand, I want to get as many handsets into users hands as possible. The more the merrier. However, every system has birth pangs, and this one will not be any different. It is one thing to operate the system as they must be today, by simulating lots of traffic. It is quite another thing altogether when all those calls are real ones with people trying to talk from inconvenient locations like inside buildings or deep down in the valleys instead of out in the wide open. So, I am happy initially to let the handsets walk into the market until we have enough real-world experience and system tweaking to be comfortable with users in the millions instead of thousands. Of course, a year from now my expectations will be considerably differrent. In the medium run, NOT initially, for a $50-100 premium, I expect to be able to get a new dual mode GlobalStar / CDMA cellular phone that is roughly the same size as today's typical cellular phones with a bigger antenna. I expect there will be the usual bevy of different, intentionally confusing usage plans, but the basic charge will go up about $5/month plus US $1.00 per minute. People with fancier high minute plans will see $.75 or so per minute. I'm not sure what long-term means anymore. My guess is that what we use 10 years from now will probably still look like a phone, but it will have so many other bells and whistles we won't think about it in the same way. I'm sitting here watching the Orion 3 launch on RealPlayer Plus G2 and remembering that I was still regularly using WordPerfect 5.1+ for DOS as recently as two years ago. Ten years ago I was using a monochrome 80286 system with a 1200 baud modem. So how can we predict anything about 10 years from now? (WordPerfect 5.1+ is still installed on my fancy schmancy Pentium Windows98 SVGA Hi-Color system, because there are a bunch of things I know how to do in the DOS version that I have not yet figured out in WordPerfect 8. And there are loads of things I can do easily in WordPerfect 8 that I cannot figure out nohow in blankety blank Microsoft Word, that my company adopted as the corporate standard before I came onboard.) play.rbn.com Second stage separation announced for Orion 3. Second stage second burn, however, appears to have been somewhat less than nominal. They're going off the air, so no more details available for now. More information at Boeing Hotline (714) 896-4770 and on Boeing's web page.

To: JGoren who wrote (4459)	5/4/1999 10:45:00 PM
From: Andmoreagain	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29987

JGoren: No blasting from this source - it would only ricochet back and flatten me. But if potential Iridium users deferred a purchase decision because Globalstar was coming up behind them, will there not be similar "non-decisions" made by potential Globalstar users because of the build-out of terrestrial wireless systems, perhaps enhanced by transmission technologies only now being developed. We are at the dawn of the modern telecom age...I think that's a given; satellites may be so much a part of the "gee-whiz" legacy of the Apollo age that designers of satellite-based telephony systems are intellectually biased by their origins in that age. Editorial opinion that of the author only. No hate mail please...

To: JGoren who wrote (4459)	5/5/1999 3:31:00 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 29987

Sprint was bad mouthed because of poor coverage [according to Drew, post 4461]. Globalstar has produced total coverage in one go, so this is not a problem. I have a very, very big problem with the concept of 'too many users'. I have NEVER heard of too many users, though I have heard of prices being too low. Sure, there will have to be customer-service people to handle questions and complaints, but expansion of that service would be easy enough and quite scalable. The service providers already have lots of customer service staff and however many are needed can be diverted to Globalstar customer support. I agree, overselling is bad [if by that you mean exaggerated claims for how great the service is and then people learn about rotten battery life, very limited coverage, poor international roaming and a heavy handset]. But a great deal of excitement is fine by me. Price is a very good way to get people excited [Iridium showed how excited people are by the legacy of 'The 'Right Stuff' - it's a yawn and what matters are the costs and benefits to the subscribers, not how gee whizz the service is]. You said '...prices will decline, I think, as the customer base enlarges. Indeed, phone customers have come to expect this...'. I have to call on your Wharton Business School training here [I am now reliably informed that Wharton is considered a reputable establishment]. When there is a HUGE surplus of something with a marginal cost of zero, any income from it is better than none. If they are tomatoes, they have to be sold NOW! We then check out price elasticity and find that minutes are VERY price elastic. People gobble billions and trillions of them if they are cheap enough. At $2 they rot on the shelf. This is not counterintuitive. There are two aspects to what we are selling = the handset and the minute. The handset, like all consumer electronics will start expensive and work its way down in price as the numbers produced increase, models proliferate and competition drives prices down. Yes, there is competition because if Q! gets too greedy, people will buy GSM handsets for the USA instead of cdmaOne. If Ericy or Telital get greedy, they'll lose market share to Q! When WWeb is available, there will be total 3 way competition between Q! Ericy and Telital. The minute, like all perishable commodities in huge oversupply will be priced cheaply to sell the stock or the minute will rot on the shelf and return a big, fat, zero to the producers. The way you sell a huge stack of tomatoes is lower the price. Sure, you can mess around with hand polishing and labelling a few for the gourmet market, but you won't sell a billion tonnes like that. As the number of subscribers increases and fewer minutes are rotting, the price can be increased. I don't believe that is counter-intuitive. Nearly everybody knows that when things are in short supply, the price will be going UP! Maurice