At 10/5/2011 05:46 PM, Tom Sharples wrote:
Caution - this may make your ears bleed - strong language :-)
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRmZ9zH-mYM>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRmZ9zH-mYM
Yeah, but under the rapper profanity, he displays a profound
ignorance of macroeconomics and monetary policy. There's a reason
that economics is called "the dismal science". It is not
intuitively obvious, and is thus prone to demagoguery.
Open Range, on the other hand, appears to be a simple case of JP
Morgan's influence peddling to get a big loan for a risky venture
from the Bush administration. I wonder if they will end up losing
their bet, or if there is some trick in there to get JP Morgan Chase
paid back. Note how Iridium was Motorola's idea, and lost several
billion, but Motorola came out ahead (and Chase, being the marks that
time, lost).
On 10/5/2011 2:21 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote:
At 10/5/2011 04:20 PM, Rafman® wrote:
Open Range Closes:
<http://www.dailywireless.org/2011/10/05/open-range-closes/>http://www.dailywireless.org/2011/10/05/open-range-closes/
Broadband's Solyndra with $240M Federal Funds..?
Interesting, but not surprising given the whole story.
The RUS (part of the USDA) usually just funds incumbent LECs, not
WISPs. In 2008, Open Range got $100M from JP Morgan Chase and then
a bigger RUS loan. The plan was to use Globalstar's ATC frequencies.
Globalstar was a low Earth orbit satellite (LEOsat) constallation
launched in the late 1990s. I think Qualcomm was originally behind
it; the idea was to be a simple bent-pipe repeater for CDMA
satphones. They were competing with the uber-baroque Iridium
network, which of course bombed miserably (I had a bit of an inside
seat watching that failure; it was kind of funny). GlobalStar's
original satellites kind of went haywire in 2007 and some of the
replacements have been flaky too, which is not doing them a lot of good.
Satellites were granted ancillary terrestrial component (ATC)
rights as a way to fill in gaps in satellite coverage; later this
was expanded to permit terrestrial-only users. That's what
LightSquared is trying to do. Open Range made a deal to use
GlobalStar's ATC, but something went wrong and the FCC revoked it
in 2010. So Open Range has some license problems. All that money
and no place to go. They were also trying to make a deal with
LightSquared, but I think that was for MVNO use of the network, not
frequency leases.
I think the key difference between Open Range and your basic WISP
is that Open Range wanted to play Wall Street's game: Take a lot
of money, spend big and fast, and hope for a return. A WISPA
member can't afford to waste money that way. I wonder if Open
Range has much cash left. I don't see how they could have spent it
without access to enough spectrum.
--
Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com
ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/
+1 617 795 2701
--
Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com
ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/
+1 617 795 2701
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WISPA Wants You! Join today!
http://signup.wispa.org/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org
Subscribe/Unsubscribe:
http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
