Didn't one of the articles say the loan was rescinded and that was part
of the issue (along with the spectrum issue)?
On 10/6/11 10:07 PM, Tom DeReggi wrote:
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 <mailto:[email protected]>
*To:* [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> ; WISPA
General List <mailto:[email protected]>
*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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