All I can say is.... That is one more potential HUGE competitor that is no
longer going to be a threat to the small business WISP.
The jingle that keeps ringing in my head is, "another one bites the dust, ah".
What I ask is... Did RUS keep or get the Tax Payer's money back? Or did it get
spent and lost?
Tom DeReggi
RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc
IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband
----- Original Message -----
From: Fred Goldstein
To: tsharp...@qorvus.com ; WISPA General List
Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2011 6:01 PM
Subject: Re: [WISPA] Open Range Closes: Broadband's Solyndra @$240M???
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
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/
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
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