03.30.10
Posted in Financials, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum, TerreStar at 8:48 am by timfarrar
The initial response of AT&T and Verizon to the FCC’s approval of Harbinger’s plans has been extremely hostile, with AT&T describing the action as “manifestly unwise and potentially unlawful”. Presumably their reaction is at least partly due to the fact that it appears at least one and possibly both of them were caught napping by the FCC’s action.
Interestingly, Communications Daily is also reporting that the FCC’s Republican commissioners sought to have the limitations on leasing to AT&T and Verizon stripped from the Order, but were unsuccessful. We also understand that at least two MSS operators have come away from recent meetings with the Commission convinced that the forthcoming proposals to encourage the use of MSS spectrum for mobile broadband (promised in the National Broadband Plan) will suggest removing the requirement for all ATC terminals to have dual-mode satellite-terrestrial capability and instead simply require that the satellite services are offered to some subset of customers.
This sets the scene for a big political battle if and when Harbinger moves forward. You can imagine the potential for arguments between Democrats and Republicans about favoring well-connected hedge funds. Of course what might trump it all is if it turns out that Huawei is building (and possibly vendor financing) the network. In that case the specter of national security implications is likely to make Mr Falcone’s previous appearance before Congress seem like a cakewalk.
Permalink
03.27.10
Posted in Financials, Inmarsat, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum, TerreStar at 4:01 pm by timfarrar
As we’ve been blogging over the last month, Harbinger is planning to deploy a multi-billion dollar US ATC network which is breathtaking in its ambition. On Friday, Harbinger filed a letter with the FCC summarizing these plans, which it had told the FCC confidentially a month earlier, before the FCC approved Harbinger taking control of SkyTerra and approved its ATC license modifications, both of which were also announced on Friday.
Specifically, Harbinger plans to develop a nationwide terrestrial broadband mobile 4G LTE network, which, without regard to satellite coverage, will provide wireless data on a nationwide basis, through over 36,000 base stations. The network will be operated on an open access basis and will initially use 23MHz of spectrum, including 8 MHz of 1.4 GHz terrestrial spectrum, 5 MHz of 1.6 GHz terrestrial spectrum (1670-75MHz) and 10 MHz of (SkyTerra’s) MSS/ATC L-band spectrum. Through a cooperation agreement with Inmarsat and associated waivers of the Commission’s ATC rules, by 2013 Harbinger will have access to an additional 30 MHz of ATC spectrum (in the L-band).
In addition, Harbinger also is discussing with other Commission licensees (presumably including TerreStar but clearly also including other terrestrial bands such as WCS) the possibility of hosting or pooling their spectrum in order to enable them on the terrestrial wireless network, i.e., the spectrum would be incorporated into the infrastructure of the terrestrial wireless network. The hosted or pooled spectrum then could be integrated with Harbinger’s spectrum to enhance the broadband capacity of the terrestrial network.
Service will begin in two trial markets, Denver and Phoenix, with a commercial launch before the third quarter of 2011 providing service to up to 9 million POPs. All major markets will be installed by the end of the second quarter of 2013. Harbinger has committed to the FCC that it will construct a terrestrial network to provide coverage to at least 100 million people in the United States by December 31, 2012; to at least 145 million people in the United States by December 31, 2013; and to at least 260 million people in the United States by December 31, 2015. By 2015, the company expects to serve more than 40 million connected consumer terrestrial devices on a wholesale basis, which is even more ambitious than Clearwire’s targets.
Just in case it wasn’t clear already, the proposed Harbinger bid for Inmarsat is not going to happen: the emphasis is on the Cooperation Agreement as the means of exploiting the L-band MSS-ATC spectrum. On the other hand, Inmarsat can’t be disappointed with $115M per year of incremental revenue with no cost and no risk.
Oh, and just to throw one more random guess out there, the first thing I thought of when reading T-Mobile’s recent statements that it has enough spectrum for the next couple of years, but that it was looking at various joint ventures to boost its holdings, and correlating it with Harbinger’s commitments not to sell more than 25% of its capacity to the two largest mobile operators, was that I bet I know who is number one on Harbinger’s list of potential target partners to use its new wholesale network.
Permalink
03.17.10
Posted in Financials, Handheld, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Services, Spectrum, TerreStar at 8:27 pm by timfarrar
This morning I had a brief chance to try TerreStar’s new Genus phone before the MSS CEO panel at Satellite 2010/MSUA-7. As pointed out in previous posts, the link is quite sensitive to phone orientation (remember not to turn around during a call). In addition, the phone software is still being optimized to address various issues such as the delay in establishing a voice channel after a call is answered, and the registration time necessary to switch from cellular into satellite mode. However, satellite SMS appears to work well (both to and from the phone) and may end up being more important to TerreStar than originally anticipated. It will therefore be interesting to see to what degree TerreStar is able to take customers away from Iridium and other MSS providers (as TerreStar’s CEO indicated was his ambition) once the phone enters commercial service in the next few months.
While some questions remain about TerreStar’s satellite service, more clarity is emerging about Harbinger’s likely ATC plans after the release of the National Broadband Plan yesterday. As we noted a few weeks ago, it appears that a consortium is being put together by Harbinger (and a team of executives recruited) to build a new entrant LTE-based mobile broadband network, using a mixture of spectrum in the L-band, 2GHz band, 1.4GHz band and 1670-75MHz band, along with substantial vendor financing. The Broadband Plan indicates that the FCC is likely to be supportive of moves to accelerate the deployment of an ambitious ATC network, though Harbinger’s network would probably not require any substantive changes to current FCC regulations. It has been suggested to us that the network would ultimately require $4B of capex and another $4B in funding for subscriber acquisition and other costs, indicating a similar scale of ambitions to Clearwire, which is targeting a subscriber base of 30M users over a 10 year period. Such a plan would certainly be a transformative move for the entire MSS industry (even if its focus is almost entirely on terrestrial services), and so all of us will be waiting with bated breath to see whether Harbinger realizes its plans, something that now seems more likely than not to become clear in the very near future.
Permalink
02.24.10
Posted in Financials, Globalstar, ICO/DBSD, Inmarsat, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum, TerreStar at 11:32 am by timfarrar
So the cat is out of the bag. As we noted last December, the FCC has been looking hard at how to make sure MSS spectrum is put to productive uses, and now in a speech by Chairman Genachowski, he has stated that the Plan will propose a Mobile Future Auction “permitting existing spectrum licensees, such as television broadcasters in spectrum-starved markets, to voluntarily relinquish spectrum in exchange for a share of auction proceeds, and allow spectrum sharing and other spectrum efficiency measures”. Specifically:
“The Plan proposes resolving longstanding debates about how to maximize the value of spectrum in bands such as the Mobile Satellite Service (MSS) or Wireless Communications Service (WCS) by giving licensees the option of new flexibility to put the spectrum toward mobile broadband use-or the option of voluntarily transferring the license to someone else, who will.”
It is going to be very interesting to see whether this “new flexibility” involves further liberalizing the regulations governing ATC, over what would undoubtedly be the heated objections of existing wireless carriers (who have always had a problem with potential “windfalls” for MSS spectrum holders). For example, would the FCC contemplate removing the requirement that all terminals must include satellite capability and offer a dual mode service (similar to the European S-band licenses which do not include any such restrictions)? Presumably any such carrot might come with a corresponding “use it or lose it” stick, although if an operator chose to stay with MSS-only services, it is hard to imagine that any third party could use the spectrum for terrestrial services at the same time.
However, MSS operators will certainly now be faced with a choice: do they continue to bet that (what conceivably might be more liberalized) ATC is the best way forward, and hope they can either partner with a leading wireless operator or attract investors to a new entrant wireless business plan, or do they agree to return their spectrum to the FCC in exchange for a share of the proceeds in the proposed Mobile Future Auction? The rest of this year will certainly be filled with many twists and turns in the MSS sector as we see which way operators will jump.
Permalink
02.18.10
Posted in Financials, Handheld, Inmarsat, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Services, Spectrum, TerreStar at 8:05 pm by timfarrar
The FT’s Alphaville blog has highlighted various documents filed by SkyTerra with the SEC as part of its going private transaction with Harbinger, and suggested that Harbinger is still focused on the acquisition of Inmarsat that it originally proposed back in July 2008.
However, in our view these documents actually indicate the opposite, that although Harbinger is actively attempting to put together a consortium to fund an ATC network deployment, this is unlikely to include a bid for Inmarsat. The UBS analysis for Harbinger in July 2009, suggests three possible strategic options after the privatization of SkyTerra (Sol), namely:
(a) Acquire Inmarsat (Ignis)
(b) Pursue the Inmarsat (Ignis) Coordination Agreement
(c) Lease TerreStar (Taurus) Spectrum.
Over the last several months, it is clear that Harbinger has in fact pursued options (b) and (c) rather than option (a) (although admittedly it would not be able to launch a bid for Inmarsat prior to the SkyTerra takeover):
- SkyTerra declared the Inmarsat Coordination Agreement effective in December 2009 (prior to the two year deadline for this action); and
- TerreStar announced in January 2010 that it had entered a 90 day exclusive negotiation period to lease its satellite spectrum to Harbinger in exchange for an advance of $30M against its prior terrestrial (1.4GHz) spectrum lease to Harbinger.
While the Inmarsat coordination agreement (including its payment of $250M to Inmarsat to fit filters to existing Inmarsat terminals) is a necessity to make use of SkyTerra’s spectrum in any ATC network, in our view the potential Harbinger-TerreStar satellite spectrum lease is a direct alternative to pursuing a takeover of Inmarsat (albeit one which may not give access to European S-band spectrum, unless TerreStar is successful in its challenge to the European S-band process, or either Inmarsat or Solaris give up their licenses for this spectrum).
Similarly, while we understand that Harbinger is attempting to raise money from a consortium of investors over the next month or two, using this new funding to acquire Inmarsat would mean that it could not be used to fund a near term buildout of an ATC network. In fact, given the rise in Inmarsat’s stock price over the last year, it appears plausible that Harbinger might even decide to sell off some of its Inmarsat shares in order to provide funding for an ATC deployment, especially if Inmarsat decides to go down the route of spending its cashflows on a new I5 constellation with Ka-band capabilities.
There would be two ways in which an ATC network deployment could happen: if the buildout was funded by an existing wireless operator as a way to add capacity to its existing network, or as a (self-funded) standalone 4G new entrant to the US wireless market. We believe that Harbinger is pursuing the second of these alternatives at present, because the (less expensive and risky) first option is simply not open to it for the foreseeable future. As SkyTerra notes in its preliminary proxy statement:
“The Company had been actively pursuing a major strategic partner for a considerable period of time. In addition, during early to mid 2009 the Company had pursued and encouraged such parties to submit indications of interest to make an investment in and/or acquire the Company. No such partnering efforts were successful and no bona fide offers were received. In the judgment of Morgan Stanley, it was unclear that there was a short-or-medium term need for additional spectrum by ATC companies who were potential strategic partners. In addition, potential strategic partners had sources of spectrum other than through a partnership with SkyTerra, including via spectrum auctions by the FCC, and sales from SpectrumCo, Clearwire or from other entities in the satellite sector.”
Thus the pressing question is whether Harbinger will now be able to convince prospective partners/investors that a new entrant wireless business plan (presumably similar to that of Clearwire but based on LTE) would make sense. Though some funding might be available from (for example) an equipment vendor who would like to demonstrate its 4G technology (as has happened with Clearwire), it is less obvious who might be interested in providing distribution. Most importantly, with doubts persisting about whether Clearwire (with significant backing from wireless and cable operators) will be able to develop a sustainable 4G business, Harbinger will need to demonstrate a compelling reason why customers should choose its service over those of more established wireless providers. The only credible differentiator for such a wireless network lies in the satellite roaming capabilities that will be available (and mandated) in an ATC network deployment (and which Mr Falcone suggested to the Wall St Journal back in April 2009 would attract “vast global demand”). Thus potential partners’ attention will need to be focused on the TerreStar Genus phone (which now looks like it will come to market sometime in the second quarter of this year, after the deadline for Harbinger to complete its potential satellite spectrum lease with TerreStar), and whether they believe it can provide a compelling demonstration of competitive differentiation and market demand, based on this satellite roaming capability.
Permalink
01.25.10
Posted in Financials, Iridium, Operators, Spectrum, TerreStar at 3:11 pm by timfarrar
Last week I attended the Iridium Partner Conference held in (a rather wet) Phoenix, AZ at the Hyatt Regency Scottsdale. Ironically that was the very same hotel where the first demonstrations of the Iridium phone were made back in May 1998. 2010 is certainly shaping up to be just as significant for the MSS industry as was 1998, with the launch of the new TerreStar Genus phone just a few months away. We will then find out whether the new entrants are going to be able to mount a credible challenge to existing MSS operators, or whether they will experience an underwhelming customer response as Iridium and Globalstar did a decade ago. Our new profile of TerreStar has just been released, and discusses all these issues, including five year subscriber and revenue forecasts, along with an assessment of the value that might be realizable for ATC spectrum in the next few years.
At the conference itself, Iridium clarified that they intend to contract for the new NEXT constellation in mid-2010, and to ensure that they are fully funded at the same time. That would presumably involve a combination of bank loans guaranteed by export credit agencies and additional capital markets funding, totaling something between $1B and $1.2B – we would guess that they might need to raise of order $200M to $300M in high yield debt or convertible bonds in addition to the guaranteed bank loans. Interestingly, Iridium now regards advance funding from hosted payloads as “icing on the cake”, rather than as an essential component of its NEXT funding, allowing it more flexibility to consider projects which would provide an ongoing stream of revenues as opposed to just an upfront data purchase. Clearly the expectation is that by taking a “big bang” approach to its funding, Iridium will not only be able to persuade their distribution partners and customers that they will be around for the foreseeable future, but also that Iridium will close some of the EBITDA multiple discount on which their shares are trading compared to Inmarsat.
Permalink
01.05.10
Posted in Financials, Handheld, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum, TerreStar at 4:39 pm by timfarrar
There’s a lot happening with TerreStar at the moment, as the company tries to complete the exchange offer to extend the maturity of its preferred shares. The deadline has now been pushed back until early February, while in a separate development, Echostar’s representatives have resigned from TerreStar’s board, effective December 31, 2009.
In the meantime, all eyes will be on the FCC, which needs to approve TerreStar’s ATC application (made back in the summer of 2007) before January 20, 2010 to prevent TerreStar defaulting on its loan agreement for the second satellite, which TerreStar’s deputy GC described in an October 2009 submission to the FCC as an event that “would likely be catastrophic to the company”. TerreStar will certainly be hoping that the FCC’s indications that it is taking another look at MSS allocations as one of the options to free up more spectrum for wireless broadband will not cause them to delay approval of TerreStar’s ATC application beyond this deadline.
Jan 13 update: TerreStar has just received its ATC license, and can look forward to launching commercial service in the “first or second quarter” of 2010 (per its recent statement to Satellite News) once the current testing phase is complete and the company has completed its Preferred Stock Exchange Offer and raised additional funding.
We’re planning to publish our new profile of TerreStar later this month, including forecasts of the market opportunity for both MSS and ATC services, and are also looking forward to trying out the TerreStar Genus phone when its demonstrated at the SATELLITE 2010 show in Washington DC in March. Its going to be fascinating to see whether TerreStar can succeed where others have failed in creating mass market demand for two-way MSS.
Permalink
12.07.09
Posted in ICO/DBSD, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Services, Spectrum, TerreStar at 10:41 am by timfarrar
On Friday Dec 4 we attended an FCC discussion of the National Broadband Plan here in Menlo Park, at which Carlos Kirjner and Blair Levin presented on various issues being addressed in development of the National Broadband Plan. The most interesting part of the presentation was the assertion that “at least 150MHz” of TV spectrum could be freed up by relocating over the air TV broadcasters to a smaller portion of the UHF band “while keeping all major channels on the air”.
Its been widely discussed how the broadcasters might be incentivized to move, perhaps by offering them a share of the future auction proceeds, so at the end of the presentation I asked if a similar arrangement would be available for other spectrum bands, such as MSS. Blair Levin confirmed that other bands, including MSS-ATC spectrum, were also under review and that historic band allocations may no longer be optimal to meet future wireless spectrum demand. As part of the FCC’s review of Harbinger’s proposed purchase of SkyTerra, the FCC has also asked some very detailed questions about SkyTerra’s progress towards an ATC deal, and the discussions that they have had with different parties.
Will the National Broadband Plan provide an alternative way for MSS operators such as SkyTerra, ICO/DBSD and TerreStar to monetize their spectrum, as it does not look like any of these operators are going to move forward with ATC deployment in the near future? Globalstar’s ATC lease agreement with Open Range is seeing more progress, but is limited to a few million rural consumers (and the Open Range terrestrial rollout is being supported by USDA loan guarantees).
Certainly in the 2GHz band (unlike the L-band) there are no existing satellite services which would prevent operators returning their spectrum to the FCC for re-auction. The National Broadband Plan is due to be published in February 2010, so we will soon see whether the FCC is going to come up with a plan to make sure that MSS spectrum is put to use in terrestrial networks in a more timely manner.
Permalink
09.30.09
Posted in Financials, Handheld, Operators, Spectrum, TerreStar at 4:38 pm by timfarrar
TerreStar and AT&T have now announced that AT&T will distribute TerreStar’s Genus (Elektrobit) phone to “government, first responders, public safety, energy, utility, transportation and maritime users” and given additional details of the expected pricing for this satellite-cellular roaming service. The phone will cost $800 to $900 (subsidies were not mentioned, which is perhaps not too surprising given that the service is not being targeted at consumers initially), and then in addition to a standard voice plan, subscribers will need to pay $24.99/month for satellite access and an additional usage fee for satellite roaming (in the United States) of $0.65/minute for voice and $5/Mbyte for data.
TerreStar and AT&T are basically targeting the existing handheld MSS market, but expect that the phone will be deployed more widely, because it will become an “everyday” phone for end users, rather than being a shared phone which is kept in a cupboard for emergencies. In our view, the size of the potential addressable market is probably not too far off that for Land Mobile Radio, where we estimate there are around 2.5M to 3M handsets in use in the US today, with about half in public safety and the rest in other government and private sector market segments (parks, utilities, railroads, energy, etc.). Of course only a fraction of those users also carry a employer-provided cellphone, and at this point in time, TerreStar’s solution is more likely to be a replacement for that device rather than for an LMR radio itself. So let’s assume AT&T and TerreStar are targeting a potential market of say 1M people. For comparison, today there are about 170K MSS phones in use in the US and Canada (including many Globalstar phones with limited two-way service at present), of which probably just under 100K are in the lower 48 states (and remember that the TerreStar phone is unlikely to work as reliably as Iridium or Globalstar in Alaska or Northern Canada).
In that context, TerreStar would be doing amazingly well if it could gain 50K subscribers by the end of 2010 and 100K-150K subscribers by the end of 2011 (when SkyTerra also expects to be offering next generation services, and Globalstar will be back in full two-way service). Remember also that in 1999-2000, despite massive advertising (at least in Iridium’s case), Iridium and Globalstar only managed to gain a few tens of thousands of users on a global basis in their first year of commercial service. TerreStar will probably share the end user revenue about 50/50 with AT&T (Iridium and Inmarsat expect to get about 70% of retail revenue but AT&T would likely want a bigger incentive to promote the service) and monthly retail ARPUs (including the satellite access fee but excluding any terrestrial voice plan) might be expected to be between $40 and $50. So let’s assume TerreStar receives $25 per user per month. If there are (in the most optimistic scenario) an average of 20K subs in 2010 (assuming deployment ramps up towards the end of the year) and 100K subs in 2011, then that would generate service revenues for TerreStar of $6M in 2010 and $30M in 2011. There would presumably be additional equipment revenues (although we doubt TerreStar is looking to make a profit on equipment sales) and perhaps revenue from some other services like M2M data (once chipsets are available, which means only a limited amount of revenue could be produced even in 2011).
However, its pretty clear that TerreStar is going to need to raise additional funds to cover its operating costs in the near future, since its cash burn rate even before going into full commercial service is about $25M per quarter, and excluding the money purchase agreement for the second satellite (not part of this $25M cash burn), TerreStar had $110M of cash at the end of June 2009. Thus regardless of what happens to the $430M of preferred shares (which must be redeemed or converted next April), TerreStar will need to raise more money by mid 2010. From mid 2011, TerreStar will also need to begin paying cash interest on its debt, at an annual rate of more than $150M per year in 2012.
Given the relatively limited opportunity in professional markets (at best a few hundred thousand subscribers for TerreStar, once the overall market is shared with SkyTerra and other MSS operators), TerreStar will eventually need to either achieve considerable success in consumer markets (requiring a dramatically different price point for both equipment and airtime) or find a strategic partner interested in buying or leasing the company’s 20MHz of spectrum for a terrestrial ATC deployment (which doesn’t look likely in the near term, not least because TerreStar doesn’t even have an ATC license as yet). In this context, its probably most appropriate to look at TerreStar’s initial service offering as a proof-of-concept (and a means to justify further funding) for one of these two longer term possibilities, rather than as the means to generate an immediate financial return on its own. We’ll see over the next 12 months whether TerreStar is able to provide the proof that both the financial markets and potential strategic partners will be looking for.
Permalink
07.20.09
Posted in Financials, ICO/DBSD, Operators, Spectrum, TerreStar at 3:20 pm by timfarrar
On July 9, DISH Network filed a letter in the ICO North America (DBSD) bankruptcy case, indicating that it had purchased all of the $43.7M of first lien secured debt from the pre-petition lenders.
The first lien lenders had been objecting to ICO’s proposed restructuring which their financial advisers (Chanin Capital Partners) characterized as “a ‘plan’ that is doomed to fail, due to lack of financing, overwhelming debt and inability to move the company from the developmental (non-revenue producing) stage into an operating, revenue producing one”, while DISH Network stated in its letter that it “adopts those objections in their entirety and is prepared to prosecute the objections…”
According to Chanin, ICO/DBSD’s plan “seeks to put the Debtors in a holding pattern in the hope that the capital markets will become more accessible in the future. During this time the Debtors have no intention of furthering their business”.
However, with Echostar already holding a significant stake in TerreStar, ICO’s 2GHz rival, which just launched its own satellite earlier this month, could this development provide renewed impetus to the long rumored merger of the two companies and provide an alternative way forward for the development of MSS and ATC services in the 2GHz band?
Permalink
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
