At 8/10/2010 10:15 AM, Blake Bowers wrote:
Although they do use that satellite word a lot, elsewhere in
their page they talk about 40,000 "cell" sites - as in possibly
they are doing their backhaul using satellite, but their last mile
by terrestrial?
I don't have a clue, but it appears they have a fairly big slug
of money.
One big warning flag I saw was they were talking about their
satellite being built by Boeing right now - only one? No backup?
Lightsquared is the new name of a company that used to be called
SkyTerra. They are and have been in the satellite business. The
mobile satellite business did not take off the way the FCC thought it
might a decade and a half ago, when it allocated frequencies to
them. You might remember Iridium, for instance. The birds flew, but
the business didn't, and it carried on as a bankruptcy asset, hardly
encouraging new competition. And cellular spread more widely than
anticipated, with better roaming, making satellite less
necessary. SkyTerra had some customers too, but didn't exactly set
the world on fire.
So for the past decade, the satellite industry has been asking for
permission to use their frequencies for "auxiliary terrestrial
component" (ATC) operation. In other words, ground-based mobile
networks, like cellular. The National Broadband Plan supports this,
so the FCC is likely to allow SkyTerra --> LightSquared to recycle
their frequencies in the 1.4/1.6 GHz range.
SkyTerra plans 40,000 cells to cover 92% of the population; this
includes both "coverage" (rural) and "capacity" (urban, after
cell-splitting to accommodate growth) cells. Satellites can then
provide fill-in coverage outside of terrestrial cell-site range, if
you have a dual-mode phone.
LightSquared's business model is to sell wholesale, while MVNOs do
the retail sales. This makes a lot of sense, since setting up a
retail network is costly, while there are existing retail networks
(e.g., store chains and carriers who don't own wireless networks of
their own) that could easily take on a new product line, and handle
the billing for their own customers. The top two CMRSs (ATTM and
VZW) don't want to sell wholesale, leaving MVNO support mostly to
Sprint; this new network could substantially improve that market.
I don't know their backhaul strategy but I expect it'll be like
Sprint's and T-Mobile's -- use competitive facilities where
available, private microwave when possible, and ILEC Special Access
when all else fails. That last resort has been something like 90% of
the time, which is why there's so much of a push to regulate Special
Access rates. VZ and ATT make their real profits nowadays from those
leased lines, selling to ISPs and wireless carriers. It's basically
an unregulated monopoly.
--
Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com
ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/
+1 617 795 2701
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