Comments on: Giving XM and Sirius a monopoly on data

By: Leonard

Leonard — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:33:14 +0000

Man did you hit that nail on the head. When I found your site, I was doing google to get frequencies to see if my old sporty’s a300 worked before I put it on ebay. I haven’t flown in a while but I can only imagine what avgas goes for now. I cringe filling up my car. All this money to protect Iraq and we pay this much for gas. Yeah we need an xm sirrus merger about as much as we need a billions bailout of bear sterns. BTW we know who services our mortgage, but does anyone knows who owns the thing?

I look foward to reading many more of your posts.

By: Ted

Ted — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 11:17:38 +0000

If the DOJ approval never happened, you would end up with one company anyway. Both companies are hemoraging, losing money each quarter, and stuck with high fixed costs. Eventually one company would have been forced into bankruptcy. And on top of it, they are now competing with mp3 players, internet radio, hd radio, etc. The merger makes sense, and gives bababooey a bigger audience.

By: Jagadeesh Venugopal

Jagadeesh Venugopal — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 23:40:50 +0000

Philip,

I’m not too sure about the data thing, but do consider the following options for good music:
* Nothing prevents you from going to the nearest music store and ripping a CD to whatever level of clarity you want
* There’s HD radio which will provide good competition to satellite-based music
* Yahoo collaborated with Sandisk some time ago to provide a music store over Wi-Fi

When it comes to data for pilots and other users, consider that people have been flying since the Wright Brothers and satellite radio has been a relatively very recent phenomenon. If it turns out that XM/Sirius overcharge, presumably enough numbers of customers will defect to whatever they were using pre-XM/Sirius to moderate any price gouging by the merged entity? Also with all those satellites up in space (e.g. from companies such as Dish Network, DirectTV, etc) a competitor will see enough financial incentive at some price point to start offering a competitive service?

By: Zoe Marvin

Zoe Marvin — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:17:39 +0000

We have National Public Radio. We have public / educational tv allocated bandwith over broadcast, cable and Directv satellite. What prohibits the government from sponsoring/commandeering some of the space and mandating it be provided free/low cost for the public good ?

By: marriagedestroyer

marriagedestroyer — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 03:44:29 +0000

Google maps mobile already provides traffic info for free so does yahoo I think. I can check road conditions on my blackberry live while driving and make route adjustments. So there is no need for XM or any other subscription traffic channel. Getting weather in the car is no big deal either-I can load noaa info via the cell phone data link.

As for the airplane, well it’s not a cheap hobby by any stretch. But if you could get some kind of internet link in the plane I imagine you would be able to get free weather. May be there is some hope for airplanes in using the just auctioned off “open source” 700 MHz spectrum for data services. XM/Serious will be out of data business very quickly as soon as someone figures out how to provide a wide area internet connection. I think high flying solar/radioisotope powered gliders with repeaters on board can be an answer.

By: Brad Templeton

Brad Templeton — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:08:38 +0000

Well, there are large financial barriers to entry, but anybody can technically launch a satellite constellation on the terms they launched theirs.

Omnidirectional LEO should really be sparsely used — mainly for rural mobile, which include aircraft. Using it for music in the city is silly and wasteful.

Strictly, using radio for music is silly. Everybody who wants mobile music should just use a digital music player which syncs up with new music (from whatever sources, including radio station style programmers who insert DJs) whenever they are close to a high bandwidth connection (such as their home 802.11, or on the ground.)

Leave the live bandwidth for useful data services, and news. Who wants 64kbit music? Why does it have to be beamed through the sky when the spectrum could be used for something that actually needs real time data.

By: Dutch

Dutch — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:15:06 +0000

Any estimate on how much revenue the combined company can generate from current and (possibly) future data services. Possible future data services could be automatic downloads of updates to the maps used in the car GPS systems, advertising data (vendor funded) to be used in conjunction with GPS systems in cars (i.e local resturant specials of resturants your car is about to pass around lunch time), etc. etc.,