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And Brad, if you want to clearly identify buffoons on this BB... why is the usual moron continually repasting the same old news repeatedly? What do you think his motives are?

So why repaste news that's 3 1/2 months old under the title "More Great News!?

I think we know the answer...

GCCRa, that is your most pathetic attempt yet. Copy n pasting posts containing old news and presenting it as new? Especially when this has already been pointed out?

Here's the reply to that post when it was originally made.

"Before the zealots get all swivel-eyed with renewed fervour,, a couple of teeny pointettes...

First this is old news and was announced back in June this year.

Second, it's just another memorandum of understanding (MOU) and as such has zero committed revenue numbers against it."

God is there no depths you won't sink to in your endless ramp attempts, which you've continued with since the share price was £2.50...

Before the zealots get all swivel-eyed with renewed fervour,, a couple of teeny pointettes...

First this is old news and was announced back in June this year.

Second, it's just another memorandum of understanding (MOU) and as such has zero committed revenue numbers against it.

Having injected that note of reality, it does however (again) represent attempted penetration into the sort of geographic market that is most appropriate for AVN's technology - low-speed 2G cellular backhaul into a region where no other backhaul infrastructure will be commercially feasible to deploy for the foreseeable future - so that at least shows that AVN is now chasing the right rabbits and as such is somewhat encouraging.

AIMO.

Thanks OPB, yes I'd just read down to Note 6 myself :)

Now SS that's too harsh.

This is the long expected "down to the wire" clarification which AVN were no doubt obliged to put out after the April RNS.

Yes okay in terms of new contract wins, we had already been told about $94m of the $100m quoted today - and yes, okay $84m of that is staggered over 7 years, so doesn't have such an immediate beneficial effect on cashflow or funding needs. But all company RNSes spin things as positively as they can to the edge of what's allowed, so no fault there.

Having said that, what's clear today is that AVN has secured its future - at least for the short- to mid-term - albeit admittedly with the help of an extra c. $35m of borrowing, but let's face it, that's a lot better than any alternative, given where they are.

The "feel" of the new executive team seems to me a whole heap more professional than the substance-free mismanaging of Williams regime, so that's a positive too.

The most surprising thing - which merits a closer examination of the figures - is the massive swing in EBITDA. There's going to be an extraordinary item or reversal in those figures to account for that.

But against AVN's history over the last... what? 2 or 3 years?... although they're very clearly not out of the woods yet, this can only be seen as encouraging news.

Jimmy, two words... Linked In. DYOR ;)

Dougal, sage advice. There is literally no point discussing CTAG at the moment.

The window for those geniuses/morons (delete as applicable) to shovel in more of their hard-earned pre-IPO has closed. I won't say any more on the wisdom (or not) of that decision, except to note that Corvus Capital's fingerprints being yet again all over the pre-IPO "offer" did make me smile.

I'm happy to wait to see the next development in this melodramatic saga. I guess that'll be some time within the next 9 weeks.. unless things slip again, as it ought to be pointed out that they have had a historical track record of doing.

And who knows? Once everything's finally crystal clear and all the dust has settled, maybe just maybe I'll be congratulating those who've kept the faith. Rest assured that I'm more than ready to eat humble pie.

But if the opposite happens, you're not going to get an "I told you so" from me. WTF would be the point?

GCCRa, I am totally unsurprised that you of all people would recommend ignoring indisputable and globally documented fact.

It's what's always underlined your personal investment strategy after all...

Cheap, ping any server you like from a CLI. It'll report on the round trip times.

Well, I set a tad more store by quoted information from the likes of Gilat, Newtec, Hughes, iDirect, Viasat, Echostar, SES, Eutelsat and even AVN themselves than I do by anything you might say, Tyche.

But hey, you carry on.

Tyche, wind your neck in for a second.

First, of course I'm aware of the AVN/EE contract. IMV that relationship is far more about providing network "resilience" - to use the EE quoted term - than primary 4G network extension. It's pro-tem and/or redundant failover connectivity.

Secondly, please for the love of God work it out. Say Tyche sends a ping over his VSAT rig aimed at a server in London. Up that ping goes to the satellite in orbit (36,000km). Down that ping goes from the satellite in orbit to the groundstation - let's say Goonhilly (another 36,000km, so 72,000km so far). From there that ping heads off over normal infrastructure off to the London-based server, which replies and sends the reply back to Goonhilly.

Off the ping reply goes up to the satellite in orbit (another 36,000km, so 108,000km so far)... and then (yes, you guessed it) back down from the satellite in orbit to Tyche's VSAT rig (yet another 36,000km, so total travelled = 144,000km).

That is exactly where the 500-600ms latency which you acknowledge comes from, FFS. Where pray tell is the fantasy?

But encouragingly where we do agree is that AVN and other sat operators do have a potential market in providing backhaul to 4G MNOs precisely like Millicom/Tigo in markets like Africa...

Tyche, backtrack as much as you like, but what you actually said was this:-

"And with ref to your distance point, it’s not 80,000km one way as you describe its 36,000 each way so equals 72,000km return hop. "

Just plain wrong. 144,000km for a round trip back to the startpoint.

That is not an acceptable level for VoLTE in developed markets for starters.

However, I don't disagree (and never have) that VSAT can play a role in providing 4G backhaul in less developed markets - and have continually said that AVN needs to focus for this sort of deployment on geographies that are precisely less developed, e.g sub-Saharan Africa. In those markets, VSAT makes sense and achieves a level of acceptability, because it's the only commercially feasible deployable technology.

Tyche, some basic maths in an effort to educate you.

Geostationary satellites orbit over the equator at an orbital height of around 35,500km. That makes them say 36,000km away from London. Any data packets sent from the ground to the satellite have to travel that 36,000km up to the satellite, then 36,000km down to the ground station, before reaching the wider internet.

That's 72,000km one way...72,000km before a VSAT-sent data packet starts its outbound journey on the internet itself.

Now the speed of light is 300,000km per second. So that's an absolutely inevitable quarter of a second of latency there.

The return journey is the exact same thing in reverse.

So, say you send a simple ping out over VSAT... please explain how an absolutely inevitable and minimum half a second latency is going to be avoided within the sending of that ping and the receiving of the ping reply?

And that's presuming there's no lag in any other part of the system, including translation of packets from one transmission medium to another and back again..

Much as you might want to believe (and want others to believe) that this is not the case, unfortunately the laws of (GCSE) physics prove you wrong.

Tyche, we have had the conversation before. I am of course aware that sat backhaul has been used for 2G, 3G and 4G... but that doesn't mean that it's fit for purpose against specific market expectations.

It'll be fine for a fair while in less developed markets - but it isn't going to cut it for any length of time in markets such as the UK or in fact anywhere in Western Europe.

I shouldn't need to remind you that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In the UK, 4G operates at up to 100Mbps per user (or 150Mbps if you look at EE's enhanced 4GEE). Or if you want to look at average 4G speeds being delivered in the UK, EE is averaging 33 Mbps down and 12 Mbps up, with an average latency of around 20 to 25 ms. Those figures are per customer across its entire customer base.

Please feel free to explain how geostationary VSAT can get anywhere near that. I am going to be particularly interested to hear how the latency issue is going to be resolved with an 80,000km one-way trip for all traffic.

It's really rather trite to keep saying "yes sat can provide 4G backhaul". Yes it can... as can two coke cans and a piece of string. But MNOs in the UK and Europe are looking for fibre to the mast wherever possible, or failing that, direct wireless links running in the GHz range to relay connectivity to masts from a fibre point of presence. Anything else is a mere stopgap.

Brad, re community fibre digs, the shining light in the UK is B4RN. They might be worth a Google, because what they've achieved is very impressive.

Particularly so, since I believe that if you check out the fastest regions in the whole of the EU from a broadband point of view, there's a pocket in rural Lancashire (just near Lancaster) where average household speeds are in excess of 300 Mbps. That's waaay up the EU speed ratings list and is all thanks to B4RN.

And no, AVN wouldn't have appealed there at all, sadly. One of the reasons B4RN got started is because it considered that satellite delivered broadband wasn't fit for purpose - either performance or cost wise - for the UK domestic and small business market.

Rural broadband isn't that small a market in the UK. c. 150k home and business properties that can't get 2 Mbps and a further c. 2 million that can't get 10 Mbps.

2 or 3 years ago, sat from Tooway, AVN or SES was the only option, but now satellite broadband for this type of deployment is being massively marginalised by the rapid spread of 4G - hence the horrific churn rates that all sat broadband resellers and further up the tree, sat operators are experiencing, both in the UK and in W. Europe generally.

Sat to provide 4G backhaul? That's only useful for temporary, emergency or redundant failover purposes.

AVN is best off - as it has apparently finally realised - now pursuing vertical markets (like military, government, remote monitoring, M2M/IoT) and/or suitable geographic markets (like sub-Saharan Africa).

Possibly counter-intuitively, when it comes to developed nations, there's still a clear-cut commercially viable case for sat broadband in geographies such as the midwest US, Canada and Australia, where the yawning gaps between areas of population density make it uncommercial for other technologies to deploy infrastructure. But Western Europe is already pretty much a busted flush for mass market sat broadband.

(There is actually some possibility for sat broadband in the old Eastern bloc, where there's never been much investment at all in comms infrastructure - hence the need. Problem there is disposable income).

AIMO.

I see the fingerprints of Corvus Capital again all over this...

Got to be fair here.

That's the first decent and significantly positive RNS out of AVN in as long as I can remember. it's actually got some numbers on it, which is the major difference between it and previous unrelenting puffs of substance-free hot air.

With the slight caveat that it is to be hoped that the info in today's RNS is completely accurate - which of course it should be, but we'll all remember David Williams...

...this announced contract is not enough to get them out of the woods on its own, but I'd say it's undoubtedly a step in the right direction.

Oh - and I don't think it's necessarily Comsat-related either, although the "seven year" period does suggest it might well be.

DanSteely...

"Several posters have never been one to let reality get in the way of hopeless pessimism. They let their past experiences dictate their view of the future through blinkers."

Well hold on a second there. Track record is a perfectly reasonable set of evidence on which to at least partly base any opinion - and let's face it, AVN has plenty of "previous".

Plus, isn't one well-known definition of insanity "doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result every time"?

Referring back to annoyingly inarguable things like track record, history and SP performance, rather than the usual promises of jam tomorrow, I'd say that there are a few here who do the same thing over and over again (i.e. keep the faith in AVN in the face of all hard evidence), keep expecting and promising others jam tomorrow... and keep getting disappointed when the SP doesn't ever bust out upwards.