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> I think you've grossly underestimated the use cases and budgets of the users. I think the point of OP, and of the other magazine article linked in the commen
by aab0 10y ago
> I think you've grossly underestimated the use cases and budgets of the users.
I think the point of OP, and of the other magazine article linked in the comments, is that he hasn't 'grossly underestimated' it in the least bit: yes, you can pay peanuts for Iridium and run an already built Iridium network on those use-cases like the military and occasional people going to war zones and NGOs and hikers, and make the business work that way. But you cannot build one costing billions of dollars based on those use-cases, which is why Iridium went bankrupt in the first place - their business plan was based on covering way more than lost hikers and Afghanistan, it was based on the delusional ideas that businessmen in Paris would pay for it. This was delusional, so Iridium went bankrupt, defaulted on its debts, cost its original investors fortunes, and had to be rescued out of bankruptcy for $25m and refocused on the use-cases which actually did work.
- roywiggins 10y agoI've read arguments that the dot-com boom and bust caused a huge amount of internet infrastructure to be built out- which were still available for the post-crash companies to use for cheap, because all the capital costs had been paid for already (by the investors who lost everything in the crash).
- aab0 10y agoGoogle certainly benefited a ton from all the 'dark fiber' and the glut of bandwidth after the crash. Probably didn't make much of a long-term difference because it didn't solve the last-mile problem to consumers. ('We now have free terabyte/s bandwidth in between our datacenters!' 'Great. But all our customers are still connecting over 1mb/s DSLs. What do we do with it all?') And other countries which didn't build out so much have still done well in getting Internet connectivity done.