Talking to millionaires is always exciting. They always look at telecom bills and think there is money in this market. However, the nature of the market has been rather capital-intensive and requires a great deal of marketing. We have people like Ron Lauder, who took his perfectly good cosmetics monies and threw them away in telecom. Likewise, we have companies like Light Squared being the latest big letdown.
A particular friend was looking to invest in wireless alternatives. He started with Wi-Fi, the great starting point of low-capital costs. If you think bandwidth is unlimited and phone calls and browsing in automobiles are not a concern, you can make a case for Wi-Fi in a geographic-specific region (normally the density and competition impact the opportunity). I pointed out, though, that when it comes to chipsets, ARM-based cellular is a giant commodities market in comparison to Wi-Fi, so economies in the long run win for the LTE family of solutions.
I am not sure he agreed, but we moved on.
We then turned to spectrum and Charlie Ergen, the CEO of Dish, buying up said spectrum. I pointed out that terrestrial sharing was about to become a reality in regulation so there was sound logic that applied to Dish (and few others). Then we got on the subject of spectrum purchasing in general. I once again pointed out that much of the business was capital-intensive and unless you have a ready-made market, the economies were skewed against you.
I think at that point, I talked myself out of a consulting gig...Read More
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