I'm not familiar with the details on the Open Range deal, however it
would be unsurprising if the government (taxpayer) ends up being the
sucker. That's the order of the day (and the last 10 years). The
Solyndra deal for example not only rings of crony capitalism but a lack
of the most basic technical due diligence. Even the named inventor on
their patents stated that the design was unbuildable at reasonable cost.
Would you buy a solar power system that came with an oil leak disposal
kit as a standard accessory?
Tom S.
On 10/5/2011 3:01 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote:
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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