Member Info for HeadInTheSand

Now I know many of a certain breed of poster on here really loathe indisputable facts being laid out. However...

Just look at the join dates of most of the currently supportive bulletin board IDs looking to drum up positivity... all joining on or after Aug 2018, the month of Amit's pre-IPO opportunity... and all with no posts on any other share apart from CTAG.

Begs the obvious questions - where were all these alleged LTHers back in the day when CTAG was actually listed? What made them only join LSE when they did?

Draw your own conclusions... I'm just stating some facts.

Brad, no. This for your info.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit

"A geostationary orbit can be achieved only at an altitude very close to 35,786 km (22,236 mi) and directly above the equator. This equates to an orbital velocity of 3.07 km/s (1.91 mi/s) and an orbital period of 1,436 minutes, which equates to almost exactly one sidereal day (23.934461223 hours). This ensures that the satellite will match the Earth's rotational period and has a stationary footprint on the ground. All geostationary satellites have to be located on this ring.".

As it happens, GPS satellites orbit a whole lot lower (at almost bang on 20,000km above sea level). This is because GPS involves multiple satellites arranged in constellation right in the middle of the MEO zone (mid-earth orbit), with several (but ever-changing) satellites being "in view" at any one time from any point on earth as they pop up above and/or fall back below the horizon..

Brad for info, that is the inevitable height for any geostationary satellite as defined by the laws of physics...

If "making a tit of oneself" involves politely noting that the latest set of fervently claimed deadlines asserted by those still looking to promote CTAG (for whatever reason) have yet again been missed, then sure, colour me guilty.

Tell you what... I'll pop by in early September just to see if anything's changed. That'll be a year after Amit's launch of the "amazing pre-IPO opportunity". And as previously repeatedly stated, I'll be the first to publicly eat humble pie if this goes the way that the several new IDs joining within the last 6 months are assuring everyone it will. Anyone reckon that another round of "pre-IPO investment opportunity" is on the cards?

Hasta la vista.

Elf, as you are one of the several BB IDs joining LSE and magically appearing for the first time ever at the end of August last year to be all supportive about CTAG, coinciding strangely with Amit looking to drum up support for his "amazing pre-IPO opportunity", you'll probably be capable of understanding why I'll pay precisely no attention to your suggestion.

Have a good evening, now.

Bridgedogg, to adapt a well-known saying, it seems that the easiest way to end up with a few million quid out of a satellite operator business is to start off with a billion quid...

Conrad/SOYO you mistake my intent. No taunting here.

I have every sympathy for anyone who ACTUALLY invested in CTAG while still listed. Forget the well-orchestrated months-long ramp campaign back in the day... it's still a given that one ought to be able to trust information that gets released via RNS.

I even have some sympathy for (but a greater deal of astonishment at) anyone who ACTUALLY invested more in CTAG in last August's post-delist "pre-IPO opportunity".

I have absolutely no regard for (but a great deal of cynical suspicion at) anyone continuing to maintain that CTAG is again on the point of coming good.

Don't get me wrong - for all LTHers of CTAG, I truly hope it does. But I strongly suspect, given the murky history of CTAG and orchestrated ramps, both back in the day and in early Aug last year, that any such positivity is most likely to emanate from those trying to pave the way for yet another amazing pre-IPO opportunity. And there's been quite enough deliberate and PI-damaging misleading done on this share already IMV.

Nuff said. I'll wish all genuine LTHers well.

hubbabubbas 13 Feb '19
"Are we going to be bought out by Easter or is it a re list?".

HeadInTheSand 14 Feb '19
"Easter eh? Presumably you mean Easter this year.

Tell you what. I'll stick that one in the diary and pop back then to see if anything in the slightest has changed by that point.

Can't possibly imagine which way that one's going to fall...

See you in a couple of months."

So... Easter has come and gone. A time that's traditional for resurrection - except obviously not for Cloudtag, despite repeated assurances from the company and its collection of motley spin merchants. Quelle surprise - never saw that coming...

Okay, even though the Cloudtag goalposts have moved even more frequently than a tribe of hyperactive Bedouins on amphetamines, anyone want to put a stake in the ground and move them yet again? Anyone?

End June maybe? (That being precisely 12 months on after WakeyMitch's guaranteed deadline - anyone remember that? "Honest! I was at an IMPORTANT meeting with Amit! He TOLD me SECRET STUFF!").

Or how about end August? (That being precisely 12 months on after the "amazing pre-IPO investment opportunity" - "Just a little more, folks! Almost there! Relist scheduled for Nov 18 on Nasdaq First North!" Very much "pre" by the looks of things so far).

Anyone now want to specify a date that's even further away? Anyone?

Oh and before anyone starts banging on about "open shorts" yet again, the only people here with very obviously wide-open shorts are those who have kept letting themselves get so vigorously reamed. On reflection, cast-iron boxers might have been a better and certainly less painful choice perhaps for those persuaded to invest more than once..

I'll look forward to hearing what the next to be missed deadline is claimed to be from the spin merchants and/or the faithful (either will do). Till then I'll leave this tragic echo chamber to the usual suspects.

With CTAG I am eternally and helplessly reminded of good ole Occam's razor... if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and only ever quacks, whaddya reckon it is? Anyhow, enjoy the spring weather regardless..

As I said before, there's a number of previous bondholders who hold (or at least held) 92.5% of AVN's issued shares, courtesy of last year's $500m D4E swap.

Well.... I say "previous" bondholders... most of them continue to hold the remaining total of c. $450m interest-bearing bonds that AVN is trying to find a way to divest itself of. Anyhow...

If any of those organisations holding all that paper are running out of patience with AVN (and I'm not saying that they are), then they'll be selling into any minispike to try to recover some value on the bazilliions of shares they're holding.

That would entirely explain the counterintuitive SP movement (downwards almost immediately following a minispike caused by seemingly encouraging news) - but it is of course all guesswork. Maybe it's just day traders looking for a quick 5-8% turn?

Who knows?

Another sensible deal by the new BoD. If one has an underutilised asset that costs money to maintain, then of course any income it can be set to generate is infinitely better than none.

The only slightly surprising thing is that there is no mention whatsoever of what this 3 (or 3+1) year Turksat deal is worth to AVN? That's more than mildly unusual...if it had been worth tens of millions of dollars of guaranteed revenue over the life of the deal, I'd have expected this AVN RNS to have been shouting about that monetised element as loudly as possible, especially noting the company's dire and ongoing need for increased income?

Depends who's doing the selling.

The guys holding the most shares are of course the bondholders, who you'll remember swapped half of the value of the bonds they held for literally bucketloads of shares a fair while back. It might be one of those losing patience and finally deciding that a bird in the hand is better? But who knows?

I'm still keenly interested in seeing what the next refinancing proposal will look like and when it'll be tabled? For all that the new-ish BoD is acting so much more smartly (hardly difficult, TBF), it still needs to find a way out of the vast majority of the remaining interest-bearing debt millstone it's still lumbered with.

Brad, also sorry to hear of your health issues, but good to know that things seem to have been addressed before the worst happened.

Believe it or not, I'm actually a supporter of AVN (well, I am under its new-ish and much more sensible regime - the DW years were nothing more than a long drawn-out and entirely self-inflicted carcrash which caused PIs much pain).

On that basis, I sincerely wish the current BoD all the best. They seem now to be doing all the right things and chasing appropriate markets and so it is to be hoped that they do turn this around sufficiently to get the company free of the remaining weighty Williams baggage

So, although I absolutely wouldn't currently invest a further penny in AVN until things become a lot clearer, I also absolutely wouldn't sell any existing holdings either.

Brad,

A simple question for you in the light of cold, hard, indisputable reality.

At what points over the last 4+ years has AVN actually turned out to have been the "strong buy" that GCCRa has continuously insisted that it has been (and still is)?

Answers on a postcard, please...

The thing with GCC is that - as the most fanatical of swivel-eyed and mouth-foaming Avanti zealots who's been claiming AVN is a "strong buy" all throughout the last four plus years and the apparently never-ending fall from £3.00 - he literally cannot handle or face up reality. He simply has to live in a desperately self-created and self-perpetuated myth.

On that basis, I'm not i the least surprised that by selective quoting, he attempted to entirely reverse the meaning of your post, MTB.... he's got 4 years' worth of form.

Tragic, really...

..and I see that apparently all that swivel-eyed AVN zealots are now left with to defend the so far indefensible are turd gags....

How reassuring.

Not sure it's the cavalry exactly. More like an outfit that holds going on 10% of overall AVN equity - much of which they presumably came by as a result of the last disastrous "gun to the head" D4E swap - trying to ensure that its own interests are looked after as much as is possible..

Remember... the bondholders last time around exchanged interest-bearing bonds valued at around $450m/£350m for paper only worth (at today's mcap) around £52.5m. For all that the bondholders had no real choice back then, that's one helluva bath to have been forced into taking.

So as per the previous recent RNS, AVN is looking to divest itself of the remaining c. $500m of bond-based debt millstone. I'm not in the least surprised that one of the major holders of those bonds has literally demanded - and obtained - a place on the board in an effort to make sure that it suffers as small a further loss as possible, while AVN tries to secure agreement with debt owners to find a mutually acceptable vehicle by which to get itself out from under that crippling remaining $500m of interest-bearing bond-based borrowing.

I very much doubt that the bondholders would be happy to take another 85% value hit on this remaining debt.

Yep agreed no surprise on this. That remaining $500m of still utterly unsupportable bond debt and resultant interest was always going to need addressing sooner rather than later.

Clearly AVN is still nowhere near any position where incomes allow this remaining massive millstone to be covered. The question for holders is... how much dilution is going to be caused this time by whatever method that AVN can find that is acceptable to the bondholders. Last time around the D4E swap resulted in an eyepopping dilution factor of 15... but I can't see the bondholders agreeing to yet more worthless paper, no matter how much may be involved.

Tyche, we're going to disagree - at least in part - again (no surprise there).

First off, my post was hardly a "deramp" - I even titled it "Not a big deal...".

Second, we'll have to agree to differ on the amount of AVN customers BBB has in W. Europe - you're massively undercalling it.

Third, that EE external 4G antenna link you supplied is really old news - from a year or so ago. Plus EE itself was already very late to that particular party - several UK 4G specialist ISPs were doing just that (and continue to do so) a full year before EE cottoned on.

And as you know already, although I am a firm believer in 4G as supplanting the vast majority of single property connectivity deployments in hhe UK, I do not believe that EE or any other MNO will rely on satellite backhaul for anything other than temporary or emergency 4G deployment, plus the absolute most extreme edges.

EE is already up into the high 90s percentage coverage in the UK from a population point of view with barely any reliance on satellite backhaul at all. It remains to be seen how much reliance on this EE will need to get to a similar high 90s geographic-based coverage. We'll see.

Where we do agree is on the inappropriateness of AVN chasing the single premises connection market. It should have always been - and TBF aparently now is - all about chasing commercially substantial contracts with the likes of government, military, major corporate etc etc in markets where the geography fits AVN's offerings much better and gives them sense.

As to BBB? Andrew Walwyn's statement you quote is IMO the usual over-egging of the pudding to be expected from the CEO of any AIM-listed company. I also agree that offering "unlimited" broadband packages over satellite is usually a recipe for disaster. Eutelsat very briefly tried offering such a thing under its Tooway brand about 7 years ago, but very quickly had to pull a 180 degree u-turn and withdraw such tariffs, once it saw how its network was being kludged and contended into treacle.

On that, I note that BBB has already had its wrist slapped once and needed to change the way it presented its Eutelsat Konnect packages from "up to" to "average expected" speeds back in mid Jan this year. Despite how it tried to spin this change to ISP Review, a quick look at "informally resolved" rulings for 16/1/19 on the ASA/CAP website indicates the truth of things.

I think these so-called "unlimited" Eutelsat Konnect packages are going to get BBB into more hot water. Yes, I suppose they are strictly speaking unlimited, but once the customer has used his monthly "priority data" allowance - ranging from 10GB to 150GB at speeds of between 10 and 35 Mbps, he then gets throttled back to an almost unusable 256 Kbps (according to Eutelsat's own Konnect packages website at least). I imagine that, once realised, this is not going to go down well...

Yep you guys are right (mainly) - but so is what I'm hearing (partly).

The schedule on Eutelsat's new Konnect VHTS satellite is currently as people have stated below. End 2019 or more likely early 2020 launch.

What's confused the information I've been made aware of is that Eutelsat has rebranded its already available Ka band services to also come under the Konnect branding.

It's from existing Eutelsat satellites that Big Blu has agreed to take on an NVNO and this is already up and running. Their contractual commitment to to put a minimum number of new customers onto this newly agreed NVNO in a fixed timeframe remains allegedly true - as therefore allegedly does Big Blu's eagerness to transition its existing AVN customers over as much as possible in order to meet these commitments.

See https://bigblu.co.uk/satellite-broadband/ for the "Konnect" branding being used on Eutelsat services already available..

...I'm hearing that Big Blu Broadband (formerly known as Europasat), Avanti's largest volume domestic and SME connectivity partner in W. Europe has signed up to take an NVNO from the newish Eutelsat Konnect satellite that's now online.

The terms in so doing allegedly commit Big Blu to putting a minimum number of customers onto this newish bird in a fixed timeframe - but any customers transitioned by Big Blu from older Eutelsat Tooway satellites won't be counted.

So unsurprisingly, Big Blu is apparently very busily trying to migrate its whole 8-10k ish existing AVN user base onto the Konnect service as soon as they possibly can.

Not particularly fab news for AVN - there's probably around £4 million of annual revenue at stake here that's going to go south.

But then again not entirely relevant, because as we all know, AVN ain't gonna live or die on having thousands of one-off customers - a thing which the post-Williams administration has seemed for some months now to be aware of.

Wonder how sub-Saharan Africa is going? It'd be nice to see an RNS or two with some detail on contractually guaranteed revenue figures from African partners, rather than just warm and fluffy PR pieces about non-monetized co-operations.