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 .
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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