Competition vs. Complementation in
SWANsat™
 ecause
SWANsat™
will be the first and only telecommunications service to optimize use of the
W-band (71-75
GHz and 81-85 GHz),
SWANsat™
will have no
competition at these electromagnetic frequency bands. However,
SWANsat™
will face competition from older, more antiquated wireless systems such as
traditional cellular systems and emerging 3G technologies.
SWANsat™
does
not view existing providers as competitors. Instead,
SWANsat™ views itself as offering
supplemental services that complement, not compete with, existing providers.
Current trends in the wireless
industry support
SWANsat’s projections that it is only a matter of
time before wireless services eliminate per-minute tariffs for telephony usage and
long-distance services.
SWANsat’s analysis of pricing trends
indicates that marketing and pricing trends are moving toward a fixed price for a set number
of minutes of available cellular usage. Trade magazines that report on emerging trends
in the telecommunications industry confirm
SWANsat’s independent
analyses.
However,
SWANsat™
considers the emerging marketing trend that provides “free” blocks of (or
even unlimited access to) weekend and evening “off-peak” minutes to be little more than
deceptive advertising. One must consider customer sleep habits and telephone etiquette in
the calculation: If one calculates the 9:00pm to 7:00am off-peak block of ten hours per
weekday and the weekend off-peak block of from 9:00pm Friday through 7:00am Monday as
totaling 98 hours or 5,880 minutes week, an honestly crafted marketing picture would have to
subtract no less than 56 hours (eight hours per night times seven nights per week) from the
usable off-peak hours. This leaves the end user customer with only 42 hours of usable
“off-peak” hours per week. If one calculates the high probability that the customer also
will not be making calls after 9:30pm or before 6:30am, another seven hours a
week should be subtracted from the “discretionary” time slot for making of phone calls due
to telephone etiquette protocol. Accordingly,
SWANsat™
suggests that a typical end user will only
be able to access about 35 hours of “off-peak” hours per week.
SWANsat™
suggests a better way to
optimize use of the available electromagnetic spectrum.
A
Time-casting Approach
to Information Usage
SWANsat™
links its services to a time-casting approach to how the
electromagnetic spectrum is utilized by its customers.
The
SWANsat™
time-casting approach is perhaps best illustrated in the following
diagram that describes a typical usage pattern for an employed
individual who works week days:
Three peak usages periods are
delineated. In the time-cast approach to information usage, there are no off-peak
hours, only distinctions as to the intensity of information access. During the
weekday business hours, the user will have need of business productivity information
to carry out his employment responsibilities. Arguably this time period will carry the
heaviest information access requirements of the user.
After work, the customer will
access leisure information to surf the internet, call friends, view
pay-per-view movies, access Direct Broadcast Satellite video and audio channels, etc. When
the customer retires for the evening, the
SWANsat™ information spectrum can be
accessed while the customer is asleep or off line on a discretionary
information basis by other users in other time zones. (In this business example, the
employee’s weekend time falls under the leisure information access schedule.)
The
SWANsat™
time-casting approach to doing information includes the potential possibility that an
employer may opt to provide
SWANsat™
accounts for each of its employees, thus
providing leisure information and discretionary information
access to
SWANsat™ as an employee benefit. Along the way, the employer will
eliminate the need to maintain many of its telecommunications accounts. The employee’s own
individual
SWANsat™ account will be used during the day to access
business productivity information required to carry out that employee’s
responsibility. The employee’s own
SWANsat™
account will accommodate whatever
usage requirements are needed to complete required task assignments. After work, and on week
ends, the employees
SWANsat™
account may be used by the employee on a leisure
and/or discretionary basis.
Upon termination or retirement
from his or her place of employment, the employee’s personal
SWANsat™ account
will be disconnected from the employer’s SWAN sub-net or intranet, but will be
maintained by
SWANsat™
as an individual account. If or when the
individual becomes employed again, his or her
SWANsat™ account can be grafted
into the new employer’s
SWANsat™
subnet or intranet.
The
SWANsat™
Shared-Risk Approach to Licensing
Bluntly speaking,
SWANsat™ is committed to the elimination of auctions as a means to
assign electromagnetic frequency and/or orbital slot allocations for wireless
telecommunications of any kind. Auctions of electromagnetic
frequency assignments tend to serve as pre-business taxes, the amount of which
is unfairly set by the bidder’s competitors (who become
the eventual losers of the auction). Winners of frequency or orbital slot auctions
always become victims of the auction process because their price of entry into their
frequency or orbital slot will have been set by the winner’s competitors, who will
not be operating in that frequency or orbital slot because they will have lost the
auction. For governmental licensing authorities to allow this “Fox and the Grapes”
approach to frequency allocation has proven to be an unwise course of action.
In early 1996, a number of DBS
transponder assignments at 110° West Longitude were auctioned off by the FCC for more than
USD$670 million to MCI Communications. The early licensees (such as Continental, DirecTV, EchoStar, Tempo DBS, and others) had paid nothing for their permits. Because
each counter bid was required by the rules of the auction to be at least five percent more
than the preceding bid, it was not long before MCI had to bid more than $670 million to stay
in the bidding. At that point, the other DBS permittee dropped out of the bidding and MCI
“won” the auction. But then MCI proved later to be unable to effectuate its DBS commitment.
MCI has since left the DBS industry, and the DBS orbital slots at 110° West Longitude
still aren’t operating today! Meanwhile, European 3G spectrum auctions have provided
hundreds of millions of more dollars in income to the licensing nations, saddling the
auction “winners” with debt-service requirements springing from the auctions that have
resulted in delay after delay in bringing their services to the public. Similar troubles
have plagued the US LMDS industry.
SWANsat™
developed a better way to undertake electromagnetic frequency and orbital allocation
assignments. It proposed a shared risk approach to frequency and orbital allocation
assignments. Under the
SWANsat™
shared risk approach,
electromagnetic spectrum and orbital assignments are assigned on a non-revenue (i.e., free)
basis in exchange for a number of accounts that may be utilized by the sovereign host
country on a non-revenue (i.e., free) basis. In consideration of a non-revenue (i.e., non-auction)
grant of the requested authorization,
SWANsat™
offered to provide
100,000 separate
SWANsat™ accounts to the host sovereign’s government services.
The accounts include free use of full-bandwidth
SWANsat™-delivered services and
free
SWANsat™ handsets for the life of the requested licenses and all future
non-revenue grant of license renewals.
With an approximate value of
USD$600 for each handset,
SWANsat™'s financial commitment to the
host sovereign country represents about USD$60 million with respect to handset hardware
alone, not counting the value of services that will also be provided on a non-revenue basis
annually over the twenty-five year licenses sought. SWANsat estimates that the value of services to be provided will be about USD$1,200 per year for each
of the 100,000 free accounts to be provided. The total value of free services provided in
exchange for non-revenue licensing will be about USD$120 million per year for
each year of the twenty-five year authorizations applied for, or about USD$3 billion
over the twenty-five year licensure.
SWANsat™ has committed to work with the telecommunications infrastructure of the host
sovereign country to rollout its
SWANsat™technology in a timely manner as it
becomes available and deployable, integrating
SWANsat™
services as seamlessly
as possible with existing telecommunications providers.
SWANsat™
will ensure that
its operational parameters, engineering design, orbital
assignments, and spectrum usages conform to all applicable regulations of the International
Telecommunications Union current at the time of commencement of spacecraft manufacture.
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