03.03.12
Posted in Broadband, Globalstar, Handheld, Inmarsat, Iridium, Maritime, Operators, Services at 8:23 am by timfarrar
Ease your trouble
We’ll pay them double
Not to look at you for a while
And you rely on
What you get high on
And you last just as long as it serves you
Explode or implode
Explode or implode
We will take care of it
This rather dark song seems to sum up perfectly Inmarsat’s current dilemma: will the recent price rises enable Inmarsat’s revenue growth rate to “explode” or will the souring relationship with customers and distributors ultimately cause their business to “implode”? As an article in Cruising World points out, the basic price of Inmarsat’s low end FleetBB plan (the Intellian version of which costs $55 per month) will “more than triple” in May, and “it’s surely looking like the company doesn’t feel much obligation to the boaters who purchased expensive but yacht-size FB hardware once able to get online most anywhere at reasonable costs if carefully used”.
I understand that the amount of bundled data included will double from 5 Mbytes/month to 10 Mbytes/month (which may not be terribly relevant to low end users), but the plan will not longer include any voice and SMS – that will be charged on top, increasing the costs further. Cruising World attributes the price increases to Inmarsat’s loss of LightSquared revenues, which is partially true, though I’m told that internally Inmarsat has set a target of double digit revenue growth within its maritime business, and with the core shipping business very depressed, the only way to do that is to force dramatic price increases upon existing Inmarsat customers.
Almost 60% of all FleetBB users are on this basic plan, and so nearly 15,000 maritime customers will be helping to “ease [Inmarsat's] troubles” by “pay[ing] them double”. More importantly, many of these customers bought their FleetBB terminals in the last two years, and now will most likely feel that they have been the victims of a bait and switch by Inmarsat.
The price changes in Inmarsat’s handheld business are equally dramatic, with roughly 90% of customers using either the basic plan or low end prepaid cards, which are also expected to more than double in price at the retail level. Thus Inmarsat will also be faced with something over 30,000 handheld customers who have bought their phones in the last 18 months and will similarly feel that they have been victims of a bait and switch.
‘Cause you’re deserted
What’s good, you hurt it
And it kills you it keeps you alive
So give it up
In a world of puppets
It’s a shame what they do to us all
Inmarsat will presumably counter that neither group of customers accounts for a large share of their revenues (I would estimate the basic FleetBB plan accounts for perhaps 10% of FleetBB revenues, while handheld is still generating only ~$1M of service revenues per quarter), but it can’t be good for long term business if there are something like 45,000 end users who’ve been hurt by Inmarsat and will be expressing their negative perceptions (“What’s good, you hurt it…It’s a shame what they do to us all”) of the company pretty openly.
Distributors are also likely to be deluged with complaints by these end users, and many service providers are already actively focusing on alternatives to Inmarsat, as we saw with the recent KVH-Iridium partnership. Distributors are thus understandable furious about Inmarsat’s moves, with the (printable) comments I’ve heard ranging from “harsh and irrational” to “just unprofessional” and simply have no idea what Inmarsat will do next.
Though distributors might not be able to “desert” Inmarsat right now, ironically the low end customers that Inmarsat is alienating in the maritime segment are precisely those for whom Iridium’s OpenPort represents a competitive offering. Indeed, in terms of the opportunity that Inmarsat has just created, Iridium apparently feel like its February 2007 (when Globalstar announced that their satellites were failing) all over again.
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02.23.12
Posted in Handheld, Inmarsat, Maritime, Operators, Services at 10:44 am by timfarrar
2011 was a very tough year for Inmarsat, when the company struggled to grow its MSS revenues at all in the face of a shipping downturn and military pullback from Afghanistan. Now 2012 has started on an even worse note, with LightSquared defaulting on its $56.25M Feb 18 payment to Inmarsat.
In the face of this pressure, Inmarsat have adopted a somewhat surprising response to increase their revenues. Inmarsat indicated in the latter part of 2011 that maritime E&E prices would be increased from January 1, 2012 in an attempt to shore up legacy maritime revenues. This move was at least somewhat logical, as it did not affect the early adopters who would be most likely to churn to other services.
However, in early 2012 Inmarsat also announced they were withdrawing the wholesale voice price cuts made in early 2011 when they trumpeted a suggested retail price of $0.55 per minute for FleetBB and FleetPhone voice calls. I’m told that apparently these wholesale price cuts had simply been absorbed by Inmarsat’s partners, and had not led to widespread retail price declines (because Inmarsat’s maritime crew calling rates were still uncompetitive with Iridium), but they did have a major negative impact on Inmarsat’s maritime voice revenues in 2011.
Even more remarkably, this week Inmarsat have just told partners that they will be increasing the price of ISatPhone Pro handsets by about 20% and withdrawing the two year prepaid card expiry for low value cards that I criticized back in 2010. It therefore appears that Inmarsat has finally recognized (as Iridium very bravely concluded when they continued with a premium handset strategy) that there is very little churn in the MSS handheld market and this cannot be increased simply through lowering prices.
UPDATE (2/27): I’m told that Inmarsat is also increasing the monthly subscription prices for postpaid ISatPhone Pro service very substantially, and we are likely to see retail prices rise by around $15 per month (in other words what is currently a ~$200 per year service for low end customers would potentially double in price). I’ve not yet managed to confirm when this price rise will take effect. This is likely to cause quite a lot of upheaval as distributors figure out how to reposition the ISatPhone Pro once it is no longer pigeonholed as the “cheap and cheerful” satphone option.
Taken individually all of these changes therefore seem to have a rational basis, but it has to be very worrying when distributors have to go and explain to their customers that Inmarsat’s prices are being increased in numerous different areas, when historically customers’ biggest complaint about Inmarsat has always been that they get a great service but are being gouged on price. This also comes in the context of a wider telecoms sector where it is almost universally accepted that prices will go down and services will improve each year. While these changes may be sufficient to allow Inmarsat to achieve (at best very modest) positive growth in MSS revenues during 2012, they could also set up more difficult comparisons in 2013, especially if some customers opt for competitors’ services instead.
More broadly, Inmarsat need their customers to respond positively to the company, especially now that direct sales are being emphasized and when Global Xpress is poised to enter a much more crowded maritime VSAT market in a couple of years time. As a result, it will be interesting to see how views on Inmarsat develop across the MSS industry as these price changes filter through to end customers, and whether customers’ satcom choices are affected in the future.
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02.06.12
Posted in Broadband, VSAT at 11:28 am by timfarrar
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve thought about the value proposition for Viasat’s new Exede satellite broadband service on several occasions, but I still fail to understand what on earth Viasat were thinking when they came up with their new price plans. These plans all offer the same speeds (up to 12Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream) and differentiate only on the amount of data you can consume each month (7.5GB for $49.99, 15GB for $79.99 or 25GB for $129.99).
Viasat have been trying to highlight the superiority of their new service to earlier generations of satellite broadband and potentially also to “low end” DSL, and clearly hope that the new service will dramatically increase the potential market for consumer satellite broadband. However, by focusing on monthly data caps as the only difference between their price packages, when those data caps are precisely their weakness compared to DSL and the major problem as far as customers are concerned, Exede’s price packages appear to violate one of the cardinal rules of marketing, that you should sell your strengths not your weaknesses.
By providing direct price comparisons to 3G and 4G wireless data pricing (at $5-$7/Gbyte), Exede have also given up control of its future pricing (because 4G data could easily drop by 50% on a per Gbyte basis within the next year or two) and highlighted the relative unattractiveness of the service itself (because with 3G/4G wireless you can offload to WiFi for free and usually have a portable device that you can carry around). Although the comparison is certainly a little harsh, if Iridium in the 1990s was a business plan dreamt up by people who were international business travelers and thought everyone else was like them, this looks to me to be a business plan dreamt up by people with a weekend cabin in the mountains who think everyone else is like them.
None of this is to discount the potential of the consumer satellite broadband market, which could certainly expand to roughly double its current 1M users, just by serving consumers as the “last resort” option. However, Viasat has much bigger ambitions (with targets of 5M+ subscribers mentioned) to compete with at least some terrestrial alternatives and is making investment plans for a Viasat-2 satellite on this basis.
To have any chance of success in this endeavor, it seems to me it would have been much better to use traditional price differentiation by data rate (or simply have a basic capped plan and upsell to an “unlimited” plan with a Fair Access Policy) and focus instead on controlling the data consumption of the highest users (as AT&T does with the “unlimited” iPhone users). Of course Exede would then face complaints from those “power” users about how they had not been honest and upfront about the data caps, but at least Exede might then have a more compelling marketing message about how it is superior to low end DSL for the “typical” consumer.
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01.13.12
Posted in Financials, Inmarsat, Maritime, Operators, Services, VSAT at 9:26 am by timfarrar
Back in 2008, the decision of Maersk to choose Inmarsat’s FleetBroadband service for 150 (later increased to 370) vessels was described by Inmarsat as “a ground-breaking deal” which represented “the strongest possible endorsement of our revolutionary FleetBroadband service”. As a result, this week’s revelation that Maersk is now going to shift 400 vessels to VSAT must be a correspondingly earth-shattering blow to Inmarsat, because not only has Maersk decided to move away from FleetBB, but it has opted for a Ku-band solution from Ericsson and Thrane & Thrane (with a 7 year service agreement), rather than the XpressLink service from Inmarsat which would provide an upgrade path to the Ka-band Global Xpress service.
Maersk’s average spend for the 370 ships using the FleetBB service was about $2600 per ship per month retail, implying that wholesale revenues to Inmarsat in 2011 were between $8M and $9M (and making them Inmarsat’s biggest single maritime customer for L-band service). While Maersk will presumably keep Inmarsat as a backup, its safe to say that the vast majority of this revenue will likely be lost once the transition is completed. The decision to make this change comes after Inmarsat’s move to impose usage caps on maritime vessels in October 2011 (with the data rate limited to 20kbps once the cap is reached), because Maersk had apparently been generating as much as 25% of all I4 (BGAN+FBB+SBB) traffic under its former unconstrained deal, and Inmarsat was worried about the saturation of its I4 network in regions such as the Middle East, which could impact higher value traffic from defense and media users.
This news also comes in the wake of Inmarsat’s major reorganization, which was revealed in early January, and has led to the exits of a number of senior managers in the government and maritime business. Despite Inmarsat’s claims that it “does not intend to change its policy of distributing its services primarily through independent channel partners”, the new management structure will have both direct and indirect sales reporting to the same people, which has been very poorly received by Inmarsat’s distributors, who clearly expect Inmarsat to cut them out of the business in the future, as Inmarsat emphasizes its own direct sales channels and gets “closer to our partners and customers” as the new CEO describes it.
I’m told another part of the reorganization is that Inmarsat’s financial reporting will be realigned from Q1 2012 so that the four new business sectors (Inmarsat Maritime, Inmarsat Government US, Inmarsat Government Global and Inmarsat Enterprise) will report their own results on a total (retail) basis, rather than breaking out wholesale L-band revenues in land, maritime and aeronautical sectors separately. This will mean that a maritime customer transitioning from a FleetBB L-band service to a resold Ku-band service such as XpressLink will bring in the same (or more) retail revenue (albeit with a much lower gross margin), whereas previously Inmarsat would have had to take a hit to its wholesale L-band revenues to facilitate this transition.
However, this is going to make financial analysts even more confused about the prospects for the company than they already are. Most analysts have maintained a very positive view of the company, and apparently the consensus view is that Inmarsat should continue to derive value from its North American spectrum assets, whether or not LightSquared files for bankruptcy. With the triple threats of continuing bad news in the maritime sector (where there is a pretty bleak outlook for shipping companies), reductions in defense spending (including the pullout from Afghanistan) and that Inmarsat might ultimately end up paying money to LightSquared’s creditors rather than receiving future lease payments, Inmarsat’s next results call is definitely going to be worth listening to.
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12.25.11
Posted in Aeronautical, Financials, General, Services at 6:42 am by timfarrar
Gogo has finally decided to strut its stuff, by filing an S-1 with the SEC in preparation for a potential IPO early next year. However, it needs to put on a very good performance over the next couple of years if this IPO is going to be successful.
The filing reveals some interesting statistics about the company, and highlights just how wrong most analyst forecasts for the passenger communications market have been. Bizarrely, the S-1 quotes Forrester projections that “in-flight internet usage is expected to increase rapidly over the next five years, from approximately 15.6 million North American sessions in 2011 to 96.9 million by 2015″ when the company knows that the 2011 number is simply wrong – Gogo (which had over 90% of usage in 2011) had “provided more than 15 million Gogo sessions” since its inception by the end of September, and previously stated at the beginning of this year that it had reached 10 million sessions, after the success of the free promotion with Google late last year (which itself generated 3 million sessions in 6 weeks). As a result, the total number of sessions in 2011 (when there hasn’t been the same level of promotional activity) across all providers in North America is certainly well below 10 million and more likely close to half the level estimated by Forrester. In fact the total number of sessions (free and paid) might be no higher in 2011 than in 2010 because of the distorting effect of the free promotion last year.
Perhaps one reason for quoting Forrester is that the other widely cited analyst projection (by InStat in October 2011) is even further off the map (one person deeply involved in the industry said to me that he “didn’t know what they had been smoking”), with InStat noting that “take rates have increased significantly, moving from an average of 4% in 2010 up to 7% in 2011” (contradicted by Gogo’s actual numbers showing no more than ~4% take rate in 2011) and that “in-flight Wi-Fi revenue is expected to grow from about $225 million in 2011 to over $1.5 billion in 2015” (again miles away from Gogo’s passenger revenues of $58M in the first 9 months of 2011).
However, now we have the public S-1 filing, perhaps some of these erroneous forecasts will come back down to Earth. The key data in the S-1 shows that current take rates are only about 4%, with users spending an average of $10 to $10.50 per flight, implying a severe (but unsurprising) skew towards laptop use on long flights (charged at $12.95). A survey (strangely citing data from 2009) showed that the average Gogo user had taken 14.2 domestic business flights in the last 12 months, indicating exactly as Connexion-by-Boeing found in 2006, that it is frequent business travelers who pay for in-flight WiFi and rarely anyone else. Of course, only about 10%-15% of airline passengers fly this frequently on business, so it is hardly surprising that current usage levels are so low (especially once very short flights are taken into account). It is also unsurprising that the service is dominated by repeat users (15 million sessions from 4.4 million unique users – and some of these unique users may have only used the service in late 2010, when free access attracted 2 million users in 6 weeks).
What is critical for the future growth of Gogo is therefore its ability to expand usage dramatically amongst leisure travelers and more occasional business travelers. The key statistic to watch is the average revenue per passenger, which has climbed from $0.32 in 2010 to $0.41 in the first 9 months of 2011. It would be useful to see in the roadshow how much of this growth is due to new leisure users (as opposed to growing awareness after major fleetwide rollouts were completed in 2010), e.g. by looking at the trajectory on Virgin America (which had fleetwide availability very early) and by examining more recent data on the average number of annual flights taken by a Gogo user.
If the average revenue per passenger (ARPP) only grows to say $0.50, because paid usage remains limited to frequent business travelers, then it will be hard for Gogo to generate more than about $100M in EBITDA by 2015, but if ARPP grows to say $1.00, then EBITDA could grow to ~$200M, due to the nearly fixed cost base of the ground-based system (airlines receive about a 15% revenue share at present, though this payment might be on a tiered system so could increase in the future if usage is higher). Clearly, to have a successful IPO at a value not less than the $500M invested to date, Gogo therefore needs to demonstrate convincingly how its ARPP can more than double within 2-3 years, which can only happen by achieving much greater take-up amongst leisure and occasional business travelers.
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11.29.11
Posted in Aeronautical, Broadband, Globalstar, Handheld, Inmarsat, Iridium, LDR, Maritime, Operators, Orbcomm, Services, TerreStar, VSAT at 12:20 pm by timfarrar
As I remarked in an interview for the Satellite 2012 downlink newsletter yesterday, 2011 has seen a dramatic deceleration in MSS revenue growth, with wholesale service revenues now expected to grow by less than 3% in 2011, compared to the 7%-8% growth seen in each of 2008, 2009 and 2010. Yesterday we also released our latest industry report which gives ten year forecasts for MSS industry growth. In the L-band market (including Inmarsat L-band, LightSquared, Thuraya, Iridium, Globalstar and Orbcomm) we project cumulative revenue growth from 2010 to 2020 of only 4% p.a. and even when Global Xpress is added to Inmarsat’s revenues in the latter part of the decade, the overall cumulative growth rate is only increased to around 6% p.a.
This represents a striking contrast with widely quoted forecasts from Euroconsult and NSR, that the MSS market (excluding GX) will grow at 7% p.a. over the decade (Euroconsult) or 10% p.a. from 2010-15 (NSR). These optimistic forecasts seem to have achieved wide currency with analysts and bankers, who have argued (for example at the Satcon conference in October) that the MSS industry is more attractive than the FSS industry because of its much faster growth profile. One example that stands out is a JP Morgan analyst report on Inmarsat, published last Thursday, which gives an upbeat assessment of Inmarsat’s prospects and projects a target price of 800p per share (roughly double the current level). Not only does JPM expect LightSquared’s spectrum lease payments to be continued indefinitely after they file for bankruptcy (which is ludicrously unrealistic once you understand that LightSquared’s political backing has evaporated and even the FCC has basically given up on them, but may reflect the fact that JPM co-led (with UBS) the sale of LightSquared’s first lien debt earlier this year), but they expect Inmarsat’s core L-band business to resume growth at 2.5% p.a. from 2012 and Global Xpress to achieve Inmarsat’s target of $500M in annual revenues after 5 years.
Where do we differ with Euroconsult and NSR? It appears the primary source of the discrepancy is in our expectations for the maritime and aeronautical L-band markets. According to the JPM report, NSR is projecting 11% p.a. and 13% p.a. growth respectively for the maritime and aeronautical segments between 2010 and 2015. We are told that Euroconsult also takes a relatively optimistic view of the outlook for the maritime and aeronautical L-band markets. However, our expectations are that wholesale maritime and aeronautical L-band service revenues will actually decline between 2010 and 2020, as customers move to Global Xpress and other VSAT solutions. As a result, future L-band growth will have to come from land-based services, particularly low speed data and (to a much lesser extent) handheld satellite phones. That’s relatively good news for Iridium and Globalstar (as well as Orbcomm, if they can continue to gain momentum), but its still unclear whether ~8% p.a. growth in land MSS revenues will be sufficient for all of these companies to thrive in the face of what will inevitably be an ever-increasing focus by Inmarsat on this part of the MSS market.
If you are interested in our latest report, which also includes a detailed analysis of Inmarsat’s maritime market outlook and forecasts for in-flight passenger communications services, as well as discussion of the current prospects for terrestrial use of MSS spectrum, please contact us for more details about our MSS information service.
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09.07.11
Posted in Globalstar, Handheld, Inmarsat, Iridium, Operators, Services at 8:40 am by timfarrar
So Iridium has announced its “vision for the future of personal mobile satellite communications”, Iridium Force, including a range of new products and services. These new products and services are not exactly what was rumored last week (no commercial Netted Iridium service or standalone Bluetooth device). Instead they include the new Iridium Extreme (9575) phone, which includes integrated tracking capability and an SOS button, a new smaller 9523 voice and data module (which could potentially form the core of a standalone voice-capable device) and the AxcessPoint WiFi hotspot which provides data capability through a 9575/Extreme or 9555 phone.
It seems the aim of the AxcessPoint hotspot will be to increase usage of existing phones, via a low incremental cost (~$200) accessory, which is likely to provide a better financial return for existing service providers than a more disruptive low cost standalone device. Indeed Iridium expects to achieve a premium price for the new Extreme phone and does not see a need to lower the price of the 9555 for now (given its strong sales so far this year despite competition from the ISatPhone Pro).
If the two phones are sold (at retail) for say ~$1200 and ~$1000 then it wouldn’t surprise me if up to 80% of Iridium’s handset sales for the rest of this year are of the new Extreme phone (assuming adequate stocks are available). That would certainly be positive for Iridium’s 2011 equipment revenues, which to date have not declined compared to 2010 as the company originally expected. However, Iridium intends to keep the 9555 in production, providing it with optionality on pricing next year, once Globalstar comes back into the handheld market.
What will be really interesting is how Globalstar pitches itself, given that Inmarsat has not achieved much revenue success with the ISatPhone Pro at the low end of the market. It seems Globalstar will need to challenge Iridium and focus on the medium and high end of the handheld market in order to achieve reasonable ARPU levels. In that case, how important will a low price handset be to Globalstar (given this strategy hasn’t yet enabled the ISatPhone Pro to penetrate the high end of the market)? Will unlimited usage packages be a better strategy to pursue, or will Globalstar’s other attributes (consumer distribution channels, better data speeds, low latency and good voice quality) be sufficient to achieve a different result to Inmarsat? Whatever course Globalstar takes, Iridium’s success in the handheld market over the last 12 months means I’m not convinced that lower handset prices are as important to future revenue growth as some people previously expected.
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09.02.11
Posted in Financials, Handheld, Iridium, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Services, Spectrum, TerreStar at 9:20 am by timfarrar
Next week on September 7, Iridium is announcing “a new force in personal communications that aims to address the growing expectation of connectivity everywhere, all the time” which is “more than the launch of a single product”. There have been a couple of rumors about what this might be, firstly a commercial version of the Netted Iridium PTT service that has been such a success with the DoD, in conjunction with the new 9575 phone (which has a convenience key that could support such functionality) or secondly a Bluetooth-enabled device (similar to inReach or SPOT Connect) that is voice and data capable and can connect to standard cellular phones (a concept that has been put forward on multiple occasions by various MSS operators, including ICO Global back in 2001 and is already possible on Inmarsat BGAN terminals). Of course there may be some third unknown possibility, but of these two options it appears that the first is a more differentiated concept and may be nearer to realization at this point in time.
This week Inside GNSS reported some interesting insights into the LightSquared/ GPS interference debate, including a meeting in Washington DC last Friday August 26, “brokered by NTIA” which “suggested that a new test period — of 90 days or more may be needed”. The article also mentioned “Guidance from the White House” which mandates that officials “cannot attack LightSquared” because “President Obama apparently sees LightSquared’s plan as a centerpiece of a wireless broadband initiative that he hopes to make part of his re-election campaign”. More information may emerge at the rescheduled September 8 hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, which could be especially controversial as “NTIA reportedly is refusing to release information about the effect of GPS denial of service submitted by federal agencies” (similar to the devastating FAA assessment) to the Committee chairman.
Finally, a little more clarity emerged on how the claims of TerreStar’s various creditors will be treated, after the bankruptcy judge ruled on August 19 that the first lien debtholders have a valid lien on the proceeds of TerreStar Networks’s spectrum licenses. As a result, it now appears that in the TSN bankruptcy, there may be as little as $30M-$40M of cash left for the unsecured creditors ($1111M left of distributable value after paying the DIP and PMCA loans vs secured claims of $1077M as of August 31), who have total claims of $460M (including $179M for the 6.5% Exchangeable Notes and $104M for Sprint), although of course some of these claims (including an intercompany loan of $57M from TerreStar Corporation) are being challenged and TSN has asserted quite sizeable claims in the TSC bankruptcy (which could increase the total recovery, albeit in New TSC Notes, by tens of millions of dollars). However, this certainly means that Harbinger is taking yet another hit on its TSN investments, when it was buying Exchangeable Notes at as much as 82 cents on the dollar last November and the return to unsecured creditors is estimated to be only 10 to 15 cents on the dollar.
In the TSC bankruptcy, the Plan of Reorganization that has been filed contemplates that unsecured creditors (including potentially Elektrobit and TSN) with total claims estimated at $136M will receive “New TSC Notes” with “face amount equivalent to estimated Allowed Claims” secured by the estimated $177M value of the 1.4GHz spectrum. The Preferred Stock holders ($90M of Series A held by Highland and $318.5M of Series B, the majority of which is held by Soros and Harbinger) will fund an exit facility of $6.5M and receive all of the new equity in TSC, while the 1.4GHz spectrum lease (with Harbinger/ LightSquared) will remain in place providing $2M per month of revenue for TSC and more than covering the estimated $12M annual interest expense on the New TSC Notes.
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08.23.11
Posted in Handheld, Inmarsat, Iridium, Operators, Services at 8:41 am by timfarrar
One of the most puzzling aspects of Inmarsat’s Q2 results was the revelation that while it has now activated over 30K ISatPhone Pro handsets (as of early August), and sold at least 15K handsets to distributors during the second quarter, land voice revenue in the quarter was only $3.3M, down 17.5% on the corresponding period in 2010. While the decline in overall revenue appears to be largely due to reduced BGAN voice usage in Afghanistan, service revenues from the ISatPhone Pro still appear to be pretty minimal, presumably less than $1M in the quarter, and Inmarsat admitted that the revenue “is still lagging where we would like it to be”.
I’m told that the reason for this discrepancy is that Inmarsat has sold nearly 10,000 phones in China over the last year, which come pre-activated with a 10 minute prepaid card, valid for 2 years. That explains why Inmarsat is now claiming to have achieved a one third share of new activations, although it still appears to be trailing Iridium in overall handset sales (Iridium added 17K net new commercial voice subscribers in the second quarter).
Of course, the booked service revenue from these ISatPhone Pro sales in China is well under $1 per month, which clearly has a dramatic impact on Inmarsat’s overall handheld ARPU. As a result, if the Chinese market continues to be a major driver of sales for the ISatPhone Pro, it will make it even harder for Inmarsat to come close to gaining 10% of the handheld market in revenue terms by the end of 2012. Indeed the challenge that Inmarsat faces in “break[ing] into the heavy-spending larger customers where there is a long-established provider in place” is amply demonstrated by the fact that apparently journalists don’t even know what an ISatPhone Pro handset looks like.
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06.19.11
Posted in Financials, Handheld, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Services, Spectrum at 7:14 pm by timfarrar
What would you know? I go camping for a weekend, and suddenly we have a $20 billion network sharing “deal” between Sprint and LightSquared “to share network expansion costs and equipment, and to provide high-speed wireless service to the phone company” described in a leaked letter to “Harbinger Capital Partners hedge fund investors”. This seems like a very peculiar way to reveal such a ground-breaking deal, especially as Sprint notably declined to comment on whether or not a deal had been signed, and there is little clarity about whether this is a new deal or simply the same “accord” that was reached some time ago.
UPDATE (6/20): LightSquared’s CEO today “declined comment on whether a deal had been finalized”, after telling Bloomberg in an interview on June 10 that “if we have something to announce we will be back here”.
Regardless, the obvious question is what conditions remain to be satisfied, before Sprint actually moves forward with the buildout. As I’ve noted before, it is critical that Sprint gains sufficient security to cover its upfront costs, either from rights to LightSquared’s spectrum assets or LightSquared raising additional cash through an IPO. However, a near term IPO looks like a stretch, and it is unclear whether the second lien spectrum rights granted this week are sufficient to satisfy Sprint. Also LightSquared obviously needs to resolve the GPS interference issues, so it can actually use its spectrum. If the leaking of this deal (presumably by Harbinger) serves to plunge Sprint into the firestorm of the GPS interference debate, then it will be very interesting to see whether Sprint decides to actively support LightSquared or takes a more neutral position with the FCC and Congress.
However, all that is somewhat of an aside to the real purpose of this post. My camping trip was only 40 minutes away from my home in Silicon Valley, but in an area with absolutely no cellphone coverage. Wouldn’t it have been great to have one of LightSquared’s new dual mode satellite phones (if and when they come to market) so I could have had a connection to the real world that would have allowed me to hear about the breaking news? Unfortunately not, because when I looked up at the sky, all I could see was trees, and as with any MSS network, you need a line of sight to the satellite to be able to make or receive a call.
TerreStar’s Genus satellite phone has proven to be a complete disaster, despite the expectation that there would be vast global demand for these phones. As a result, I wonder if some of the commentators in the LightSquared proceeding really have any idea what they would be getting from the LightSquared network in rural areas (after all, a terrestrial network covering 92% of the population will leave at least 25M people relying on satellite coverage).
For example, this letter asks us to “think of Native American communities who do not even have basic cellphone service now but would with this network” and this letter notes how the “new super-fast broadband wireless network that is backed up by satellite communications…would provide our staff seamless connectivity even in extremely remote locations”. However, that’s hardly surprising when we are told how you’ll have voice connectivity and can get your e-mails “no matter where you are, if you step out of your car, in the Yellowstone National Park” (where there’s also an awful lot of trees and mountains) or “in the middle of Grand Canyon” (pretty difficult when there’s a 5000ft cliff to your south). Haven’t we heard that one somewhere before?
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