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August 8, 2004

Q. My business travel takes me to many areas in America without cell phone coverage. What about satellite phones?

A. If your need was strictly personal you could study for your ham license, pass the test, and then connect with amateur radio equipment. But phone patches into the public telephone system are limited, and business communication is prohibited on the ham bands, so that option is out. Business radio, like what police or taxi dispatch services use, is local, complicated, and expensive to set up. A sat phone is probably the way to go.

I wrote about these people recently. I haven't done business with them but I can tell by their site that they are well organized. What's really nice is that you can rent first, to see if you like sat phones before you buy:

http://www.satphonestore.com (external link, no financial relation to privateline.com)

A refurbished GlobalStar sat phone, cheapest for calling in the Americas, and accessories may cost around $750, along with air time starting at $40 a month. But you will be able to communicate. You order over the web or call them and they ship the phone to you. Your employer may complain about the price but what is the cost of being out of touch and unable to do business? My first cellular phone in 1986, by the way, cost over a thousand dollars and my first monthly cellular bill was, dare I admit this?: $334! (I can still hear my old boss yelling at me.) One last thought, you need to be outdoors when you call, it's very tough to pick up a "bird" indoors. And here's a good URL on the technology:

http://www.space-technology.com/

projects/globalstar/

index.html#globalstar2 (external link)

August 7, 2004

Musings between Tom Farley and J.R. Snyder Jr. (internal link)

J.R.: It seems wireless operators are becoming "virtual" networks where some companies may merely operate in name only, like Virgin Wireless, others may operate by owning the spectrum but not the towers, or they may own everything. Verizon Wireless and Cingular seem to be the new empires, but Cingular has no assets currently in Qwest states, so I don't have a feel for them at all.

Tom: I can't tell Verizon, Cingular, and T-Mobile apart. They're just wireless carriers who may have wireline also, for all I know. Regional names give connectedness to place, an anchor, a local reference point. These new, strangely named companies could exist anywhere, which is what their marketing people want. No place identity. Roseville Telephone spent half a century building their good name, then ditched it when they became a regional telecom. They now call themselves SureWest. What the heck is a SureWest?

J.R.: Cingular, Verizon, and Qwest, are all names contrived by some socio-psychobabble-marketeer over paid MBA's. Even though U S WEST was post '84, I clearly remember the name U S West was created by Jack McAllister, an old Bellhead Network guy, the last CEO of that RBOC who was from Network. Forever after the company was run by Marketing people from Sales and the Business Office who hated the original U S WEST "mustangs riding in the dust" commercial campaigns and stamped every vestige of that out by 1989. It says something that they're trying to recreate that now with a hokey "Spirit of Service" campaign which tries to evoke the old image of the corporate culture we know is dead. It obviously irks me.

The name Qwest was the brainchild of that crook Joe Nacchio, the architect of the hostile takeover of U S WEST in 1999. He's still under investigation by the SEC, has paid one fine but that hasn't stopped him from, not ironically, resurfacing as part of the restructuring of MCI from bankruptcy.

My stomach literally flipped when Verizon and Verizon Wireless came out with its new name based on a cross between the Latin word "veritas" and "horizon." Oh, yuck.

T.F.: "Spirit of Service" indeed. They are capitalizing on the slogan used and made famous by The Pioneers, the retired Bell System employee group. History is no more important to the major telecoms than place identity; why are they using it now? Perhaps marketing has discovered, too late, that history is important, customer service over the generations is something to be proud of. It's too bad the old names are gone. How does a Nevada Bell customer relate to their local telco now called SBC? Strange times.

J.R.: Is it me or does this seem like a weird business climate all-together and telecom is an example of the larger picture? AmericaWest Airlines actually runs and owns part of its fleet. Mesa Airlines really owns the new small regional jets and operates them under the name of AmericaWest, U S Air and others. Airtran does the same thing for United and Delta.

Pan Am burned cash for almost 30 years before it died an ignomious death. United and American are on the verge. Therefore when AT&T says it's writing off $885 million of $43.8 billion, it may seem like a small change in percentage but I can't help but think that it's an indicating a deeper, more systemic problem. When analysts upgrade Qwest to "neutral" from "underperform" or "outweigh" while it's bleeding millions, that seems wrong to me.

T.F.:Telecom is personal to us so change bothers us more than it should. If we tracked how many companies Sony bought over the years, or how many airlines have changed names or gone out of business, well, we just wouldn't care. But we do care about telecom and want it to be more than an ordinary business. It no longer is. Some of the people and technology are still special but the old corporate culture special to telecom is gone or going. So we will always have a melancholy attached to these changes. It was a nice time, now we can only remember it.

J.R.: Hmm. Melancholy. From telephony to telecom. It isn't just the unique telecom culture, which fit me personally. It's also the larger picture: the loss of company culture in general, which I started bemoaning about 6 years ago. I think when I went to college in the early 70's we were the last of the college graduates who were told to get a liberal arts degree. With a broad education we'd go to work for a company, small, medium or large, and be "molded" in the ways of IBM, AT&T, BofA (then confined to California and Arizona only), Motorola, Chrysler, the Arizona Republic, Sturm Ruger and so on. I have a friend I went to high school and college with who worked for Motorola since college until he was laid off a few years ago and has the same sort of nostalgia about that business. For him, Iridium killed it. Different company culture, product (although somewhat related) but same outcome.

After that universities and colleges encouraged people to go to business schools, not liberal ed. People got rubber stamped in the philosophy of the Wharton School of Business. Something unique about Kathleen Pierz (internal link) is that she went to what was then called the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management in Phoenix which bucked this trend until recently when it completed its about face and renamed itself after Steven Covey and then fully embraced "The Seven Principles of Highly Effective People" or some such nonsense. Some time in the 80's they force fed on us, the managers at U S WEST, "The One Minute Manager", which I never read or any of those subsequent books, much to their chagrin. Which probably is what did me in . Now I hear it's a book called "Who Moved My Cheese?"

http://www.whomovedmycheese.com/ (external link)

August 6, 2004

Wireless market share

Which carrier has the most customers? Check below. This nice chart is from the TNS website: http://www.tnstelecoms.com/ (external link) It's from TNS' larger report, Telecom Industry Market Share -- First Quarter 2004. Totals may add up to more than 100% due to rounding.

Wireless Service

August 5, 2004

I didn't realize satellite phones are becoming affordable. This place: http://www.satphonestore.com (external link, no financial relation) sells a refurbished Iridium/Motorola 9500 for $685.00 US and air time from $.85 to $1.85 a minute. Those minutes are comparable or less than international roaming charges for your cellular phone. And unlike your present mobile, this phone should work from anywhere in the world. Renting is also reasonable: $125 for three weeks and air time at $1.75 a minute. They ship the phone from Miami.

I know a mother whose daughter will soon be travelling to Gambia, both were worried about being out of touch. I think the Mom would have gladly paid three times the rental for the security of getting a call each day. Remember extra batteries, though, or a solar charger. Accessories are very expensive but the ability to communicate at all, regardless of price, is remarkable.

August 4, 2004

Who's building?

Two little industry birdies tell me the following:

T-Mobile. They've cut their development budget to nothing due to the Cingular/AT&T merger. Cingular revoked the spectrum sharing arrangement in California and now T-Mobile is scrambling to put money together to buy spectrum.

Cingular. Things go on as normal. Many companies building towers for them.

AT&T. They've shut down building completely. I have not heard from anyone that they've started back up again.

Nextel. Same as last year, heavy development. [Nextel's told the financial community they'll build 2,200 sites this year, ed.]

Verizon. Sorry, I don't hear too much on them.

Sprint. Going forward with their "Keebler" project, a New England and Mid-Atlantic regional cell build. 300 new and infill sites there. Rest of the country as normal. One interesting thing I've heard recently is that Sprint may sell all their sites.

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