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
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