So they were shutdown by patent trolls and would have otherwise succeeded, or they couldn't reach a low enough cost, which your envelope process will enable?
What are the biggest hurdles in general and what drives the costs?
Patent trolls? No. Do some research and you can read the court case etc . :) They tried to rip off a small business. Nasty stuff.
Cost isn’t really an issue for them. They are desperate for any other source of scalable revenue other than the ad business .
As for hurdles and costs etc , right now it’s like any other business. Finding the right talent , partners and vendors .
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The point is, if Google could not pull it off, why would the small business have been able to pull it off?
I suppose what I'm really asking is what are the biggest costs? Is it making the balloons? Is it all the telecom equipment? Is it having to replace the balloons frequently? -- I'm not sure what the lifecycle is like.
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Again, it’s not that google couldn’t pull it off. It’s that they stole technology from a firm that was and is operating quite well.
Do your own due diligence :)
The world is a big place. The telcom needs (and other uses of an airborne payload agnostic platform) is immense.
Opex costs dominate . Our capital stack is …. complex.
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