07.15.10
Posted in Globalstar, ICO/DBSD, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum, TerreStar at 10:15 am by timfarrar
At today’s FCC Commission meeting, the Commission began its proceeding “to spur mobile broadband investment in MSS bands”, which will take the form of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) and a companion Notice of Inquiry (NOI). The NPRM and NOI have now been published along with a press release and accompanying statements from all five of the Commissioners.
The NPRM is focused on two issues: First, it proposes to add co-primary fixed and mobile allocations to the 2 GHz band. Second, it proposes to expand existing secondary market policies and rules to address transactions involving the use of MSS bands for terrestrial services. However, given that the Commission notes that the Globalstar-Open Range lease was already evaluated under this standard, this second issue is more of a streamlining matter than a substantive change in policy.
The NOI “requests comment on further steps the Commission can take to increase the value, utilization, innovation, and investment in MSS spectrum. It builds upon the proposals in the NPRM and addresses, in part, the recommendations of the National Broadband Plan for increasing terrestrial deployment in the MSS bands. The NOI inquires about ways to create opportunities for more expansive and efficient use of the 2 GHz band for stand-alone terrestrial uses. It also asks, if the value of the spectrum increases, what actions the Commission should take to further the overall public interest.
The NOI further requests comment on other ways to promote innovation and investment throughout all three of the MSS bands while also ensuring market-wide mobile satellite capability to serve important needs like disaster response and recovery efforts, rural access for consumers and businesses across America, and various government uses.”
Most of the NOI is focused on the 2GHz band, as I suggested last month, and suggests that either incentive auctions or a voluntary relinquishment of part of the spectrum would be means of providing appropriate compensation for the step up in value for the remaining spectrum. Of course, if part of the spectrum was relinquished, and the license for the remaining spectrum was still based on the MSS rules, it would quite possibly be necessary to continue to operate an MSS satellite. Such an outcome would almost certainly require a merger of DBSD and TerreStar (and disposal of two of their three satellites – 2 in-orbit and 1 ground spare), in order to reduce their satellite operating costs.
What the NOI doesn’t do is make specific proposals about relaxing the ATC rules in the Big LEO and L-bands, although it asks whether there are “any other actions that the Commission could take that would increase terrestrial use of the MSS bands”. To me, the tenor of the NPRM and NOI suggests that the FCC feels it has given ground to Harbinger (in approving the SkyTerra transaction and ATC modifications) and Globalstar (with what will presumably be a near term approval of its ATC waiver requests, for which the deadline is now August 2). Now the FCC needs to sort out the 2GHz band and it appears to be adopting a somewhat harder line than some might have hoped.
In his statement, Commissioner Copps highlights his belief that “charging fees for the ancillary terrestrial use in the MSS bands could provide incentives to ensure that the spectrum resource is used more efficiently and intensively”. However, whether this position will be shared more widely by the other Commissioners is still to be seen.
This must be a disappointment to those who had hoped for a relaxation of the ATC gating requirements without any significant givebacks in exchange. In particular, it may be hard for the FCC to agree to such a relaxation if a hard line is taken over incentive auctions or other compensation for the “step-up in value” in the 2GHz band.
With this proceeding going forward at the same time as MSS-ATC proponents are trying to secure partners and further investment (and in some cases are in bankruptcy or on the verge of it), it is going to be very interesting to see how the regulatory and financing activities affect one another over the next few months.
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06.28.10
Posted in Financials, Globalstar, ICO/DBSD, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum, TerreStar at 1:32 pm by timfarrar
The President has now announced his support for the proposal set out in the FCC’s National Broadband Plan (NBP) to free up 500MHz of spectrum for wireless broadband over the next decade. However, even though “Our nation’s ability to lead the world in innovation and technology is threatened by the lack of sufficient spectrum for wireless broadband applications and services” according to the FCC, it doesn’t necessarily mean that spectrum will prove to be a good investment over the next few years. (In this analysis, we’re looking at the opportunity for financial investors, as opposed to cellular operators – just like in the housing market, if you intend to use your spectrum, then that’s a different proposition from planning to flip it to someone else).
Indeed it is highly desirable from the FCC’s point of view that spectrum should become cheaper rather than more expensive, because that will enable more competition in the wireless market and result in lower prices for consumers. In the absence of lower prices for spectrum, it is likely that some cellular operators will be shut out entirely from 4G, or will be forced to merge with competitors in order to combine their spectrum holdings – not the outcome that the FCC wants to see. The FCC also doesn’t want to reward speculators – it would much prefer spectrum to be put to use, rather than see financial investors lock it up with a view to profiting from higher prices in the future. Although some might argue that the FCC also needs to raise money from auctions (not least to fund the buildout of public safety networks), it is far from clear that such motivations will weigh heavily in the FCC’s decisions (even if some members of Congress disagree). Certainly the concept of maximizing the proceeds of future auctions was not emphasized in the NBP.
From a historical perspective, despite this apparent crisis, spectrum prices in the US (on a per MHzPOP basis) are actually far lower than a decade ago. This is entirely logical: if it now takes 50MHz+ of spectrum to support $30 of monthly data services, whereas ten years ago operators required only 20MHz of spectrum to provide $50 of monthly voice services, then cellular operators simply can’t produce the same ROI from each MHz of spectrum as they did in the past.
Just the objective of freeing up 500MHz of spectrum (almost doubling the amount currently available for terrestrial cellular service) alone is likely to put a damper on spectrum prices. In recent months, we have also seen the FCC moving rapidly to finalize rules to enable use of 25MHz of WCS spectrum, and formulate policies to ensure that 90MHz of MSS-ATC spectrum is put to use. In addition, the FCC may also decide to limit the amount of additional spectrum that AT&T and Verizon (who accounted for the vast majority of spending during the 700MHz auction in 2008) can acquire in the future.
In my view, all of these developments point to lower spectrum prices in the next few years. In the short term, prices will be depressed further by the glut of spectrum owners seeking to monetize their holdings at the moment: Harbinger, Clearwire, NextWave and other MSS operators, to name just a few. This comes at a time when there is a relative lack of buyers, with most analysts hard pressed to name anyone other than T-Mobile that is an obvious partner for these companies. Investors who acquired undervalued spectrum assets a few years ago (particularly if that was prior to recent rule changes) may be OK, but new investors will need to be more cautious about the price they pay for these assets.
In summary, even if there is considerable long term demand for spectrum, it is a fallacy to equate this with increasing prices. In that regard, spectrum is like oil: you know there will be more demand in the future, but that tells you nothing about how the price will move in the next year or two. The short term price (and indeed the price in auctions) is determined by the balance of demand and supply today. That alone is a negative sign for investors in spectrum assets. However, when the FCC (unlike OPEC) would also prefer to see lower prices for spectrum, then it certainly looks like a risky bet to assume that prices will go higher anytime soon.
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06.21.10
Posted in Globalstar, ICO/DBSD, Inmarsat, LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum, TerreStar at 2:36 pm by timfarrar
On Friday, the FCC’s Spectrum Task Force announced a “plan to increase value, utilization, and investment in mobile satellite service (MSS) bands”, beginning with a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) which they hope to approve at the Commission meeting scheduled for July 15.
Although the announcement itself referred to the whole 90MHz of MSS spectrum identified in the National Broadband Plan (NBP) as suitable for terrestrial broadband, the focus of the discussion at Friday’s press conference appeared to be around the 2GHz (S-band) spectrum. Indeed the FCC highlighted that this spectrum, which is held by DBSD and TerreStar, is “right in the neighborhood of both the AWS spectrum and the PCS spectrum”. In particular, the FCC indicated that it would propose changing the table of allocation for the 2GHz spectrum, to allow primary terrestrial use (without ATC), and then enable secondary leasing for all three MSS spectrum bands. These rules would enable secondary leasing to begin “relatively soon”, if the FCC agreed to the proposal of the Spectrum Task Force.
According to Communications Daily, this proposal might include “charges”, presumably as “consideration for the step-up in the value of the affected spectrum” (as proposed in the NBP), but would avoid some of the delays associated with an incentive auction (which was one of the other options suggested in the NBP). Of course spectrum leasing for purely terrestrial use (as would then be possible in the 2GHz band) would be rather more straightforward than leasing under the current set of ATC restrictions, but the level of any FCC “charges” (and perhaps other conditions on terrestrial buildout or provision of satellite services) would dictate how much value could be realized by the existing spectrum holders.
What is particularly interesting is that this NPRM is being issued so quickly, when the Credit Suisse research conference call three weeks ago indicated that it was not expected until September. In addition, the NBP suggested that an S-band (2GHz) Order would not be expected until 2011 (as opposed to 2010 for the L-band and Big LEO bands), at least partly because decisions might be impacted by the outcome of the adjacent AWS-3 band proceeding.
Perhaps the reason for this change in timing is hinted at by the first line in the FCC’s announcement: the need to “increase…investment in MSS bands”. Certainly both Echostar and TerreStar were well prepared with immediate comments on the announcement (with Echostar also noting that the proposed change would “help spur investment”), and TerreStar desperately needs new investment in the very near future. It looks like the outcome of the FCC meeting in July (which according to Friday’s press conference is “still in flux”) might therefore prove critical to TerreStar’s future.
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05.25.10
Posted in Financials, LightSquared, Operators, Spectrum, TerreStar at 4:08 pm by timfarrar
As Harbinger tries to secure partners for its proposed 4G LTE network, it now looks like Craig McCaw and Clearwire could potentially end up playing spoiler.
A research note from Credit Suisse, published on Monday highlighted the potential value of MSS spectrum and suggested it could be worth as much as $0.50 per MHzPOP. It also noted that the spectrum value of Clearwire “is likely underappreciated”. No substantive justification is given for the $0.50 per MHzPOP valuation suggested in the research note, other than the fact that this is close to the median value in the 2006 AWS spectrum auctions, and there are a number of elementary mistakes in the analysis of TerreStar (most notably that no mention is made of the more than $400M of Convertible Preferred Stock which must be repaid before any value from the 1.4GHz spectrum is realized by the equity holders). The fact that the FCC “will expect a portion of the
step up in value for both [2GHz] MSS and broadcast spectrum” is also only mentioned in passing, despite the fact that this will have a huge impact on the realizable value if the spectrum is ultimately included in an incentive auction. Despite this, the research certainly seems to have stimulated some increased interest in MSS-ATC spectrum, as evidenced by the jump in the price of TerreStar’s stock on Monday, and could be seen as potentially helping Harbinger in its quest to attract investors for its 4G network.
However, perhaps coincidentally, last Friday, Business Week published an article highlighting Clearwire’s spectrum value (which it puts at “$20B or more” or $0.50/MHzPOP). In my view, this article clearly indicates that Clearwire is now open to offers for purchase of some of its spectrum. In that case, wireless operators who are looking for spectrum in the short or medium term, such as T-Mobile, would certainly have a viable alternative to MSS-ATC spectrum if they are looking to build out a 4G network. Given that there are only a few potential purchasers of wireless spectrum at the moment (and the it now looks like the FCC doesn’t want AT&T and Verizon to buy any more spectrum in forthcoming auctions), the fact that Clearwire and Harbinger may end up competing to attract one of this limited number of partners won’t do anything to push up the price that can be secured for their spectrum in the near term.
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05.14.10
Posted in Financials, Handheld, Operators, Services, Spectrum, TerreStar at 10:26 am by timfarrar
Back in March, I was lucky enough to try TerreStar’s Genus phone at the Satellite 2010 conference. At that time it was clear that the phone needed further work to get it ready for commercial service, and recent filings from TerreStar indicate that the company is now working with HNS on an “ATT-QoS Workaround” to address some “APN Issues” (APN or Access Point Node relates to data services, which I did not try to use back in March).
UPDATE: I’m told by a technical expert in this area that the GMR1-3G protocol used by TerreStar treats all information as packet data, including voice (which has the highest QoS). Given that AT&T’s terrestrial network carries voice over GSM and does not normally provide an equivalent voice over packet data service at this point in time, it appears quite plausible that the workaround relates to an attempt to optimize voice performance rather than being an issue for TerreStar’s data services.
However, my concerns about the viability of the Genus phone relate much more to whether the orientation-sensitivity of the phone will actually be acceptable in real world usage conditions. To use the phone you need to know where the satellite is located (roughly southwest when you are on the East Coast) and have clear visibility in that direction. Though that was simple at the Satellite conference, where this direction was out over the Potomac river, it certainly won’t always be the case in rural areas, unless its a desert or a prairie. I still remember only too well the joke I was told by a Globalstar engineer ten years ago – that their system was designed for a “man out standing/outstanding in his field”. More to the point you also need to stand still and not turn around – very different to the situation with Iridium and Globalstar handsets, where the extending antenna goes above your head and allows you to “walk and talk”.
If orientation-sensitivity does prove to be a big problem for potential users, as I think it will, then TerreStar is faced with an unpalatable choice: design a phone with an extending antenna, which will work fine, but would have no mass market appeal, or sell a phone like the Genus, which could conceivably have wider appeal, but won’t provide acceptable performance in satellite mode. Fundamentally, I therefore don’t see any reason to change the opinion I expressed last year during the DBSD bankruptcy, that “the part of TerreStar’s business plan directed to a mass market service is very unlikely to succeed”.
However, there has been one important change in the environment for TerreStar over the last six months, because the FCC has now held out the possibility that 2GHz MSS spectrum holders will be able to participate in an incentive auction, which would potentially allow them to return their spectrum to the FCC for re-auction as terrestrial spectrum without any ATC restrictions. Given the difficulty in realizing value from a satellite roaming business plan, then unless Harbinger negotiates a lease agreement for TerreStar’s satellite spectrum, as part of its planned L-band ATC deployment, it seems likely that this would be the best exit TerreStar could hope for. However, given that the FCC would only give TerreStar a proportion of the proceeds from the auction, and it would probably take a couple of years before that auction even happened (during which period TerreStar will have to raise more money to keep its satellite in operation), it is hard to imagine that the proceeds could exceed the secured debt load that TerreStar has accrued to date. Even if TerreStar did enter some sort of lease agreement with Harbinger (some details of the draft term sheet for the Spectrum Pooling Agreement, which appears to contemplate a “potential purchase of the S-band Spectrum” as one option, but not a takeover of TerreStar itself, have also been publicly filed), then it seems implausible that this payment would exceed the value of SkyTerra’s lease agreement with Inmarsat, which calls for payments of $115M per year, and it could very well be much less. Unfortunately even $115M per year would be insufficient to pay the interest on TerreStar’s secured debt, when it becomes cash pay next year. Remember also that if TerreStar stays out of bankruptcy, it will at some point have to pay Sprint’s spectrum clearing expenses, which Sprint has claimed exceed $100M for each of TerreStar and DBSD.
At this point in time, the future for TerreStar therefore looks pretty uncertain. More importantly for the rest of the MSS market, it is far from clear whether the Genus phone will provide meaningful competition to other handheld MSS providers, and even whether AT&T will actually go ahead with any large scale commercial launch of the handset. I’m sure everyone will be watching with interest to see what news emerges over the next few weeks.
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04.01.10
Posted in LightSquared, Operators, Regulatory, Spectrum at 1:32 am by timfarrar
Is Harbinger’s motto “Outwit, Outplay, Outlast“?
It surely wasn’t a surprise to Harbinger’s lawyers (who employ Tom Tycz, former Chief of the Satellite Division in the FCC’s International Bureau) that AT&T has challenged the conditions forbidding SkyTerra from leasing spectrum to AT&T and Verizon and restricting the amount of ATC traffic from those two operators.
Meanwhile, Harbinger’s announced intention to build a competing network has clearly forced AT&T to take ATC a lot more seriously than had apparently been the case in recent years. Presumably if the conditions were invalidated, then it might become harder for the FCC to resist any subsequent transaction with AT&T or Verizon. Thus Harbinger might conceivably foresee a profitable way out without having to take the risk of building an LTE network and actually having to attract customers.
On the other hand, if this project gets tied up in a legal and political battle for the next several years, then we might instead see Harbinger losing its investment and being voted off the island.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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