Viper Networks Inc (VPER)

[waitingonvper]

I thought I'd post my thoughts that have been rolling around in my head for a month or so.

Reliance Globalcom isn't us. We are partnered with Globalcom Information Services at http://www.gis.com.sg/ (press release link on that page). The Globalcom w/ 100M in sales is part of Reliance, so not us....as far as I can tell anyway.

A few other notes after I finally went to get answers to some of my nagging questions:

Does 5M subscribers sound like alot to you? It sounded like a heck of a lot to me. Then I found that India has over 600M total subscribers and supposed to end the year at 660M. See http://indiatelecomnews.com/?p=851 In percentage terms, 5M is less than 1%. BSNL has 100M total telecom subscribers. Not knowing anything else, I think their catching less than 1% of a total market or 5% of their own customers in a market that is still in the hockey-stick growth phase (although nearing the end) is doable in my book, especially when you are working with the government sanctioned, one of the biggest telecoms in the nation. BSNL seems to get a few breaks in the telecom regulations, so investing in a company with a legal advantage over the competition always seems like a good idea to me (rationalizing my fears, I guess).

Interestingly, BSNL as a company seems to be on a roller coaster. Start your research at http://indiatelecomnews.com/?p=851 If I went back to the same site I was at last week, you'll see news about BSNL, good and bad. In any case, they are still one of the biggest telecoms in that nation.

Do you wonder if that calling card is really for sale? Check out http://www.bsnl.co.in/service/itc.htm which I'm pretty sure is the card most of us are counting on. It's under the "intelligent network services" tab under the "services" tab on their home page.

So, on a whim while researching this stuff last week (just to make myself feel like my investment isn't really going down the crapper and to rationalize away all my fears of such), I e-mailed the contact info about the card. I got an e-mail back from an e-mail address with "farid@" in it. Apparently, the big man answered my question...or not. I asked if this card allowed someone to call from India to the US and if sales were going well, and I identified myself as an investor. He said the card is for sale in Singapore, pointed me to www.ciriliumindia.com and said they are adding countries as they go. That's it. Why not answer the entire question in some way, maybe "I can't comment on sales info right now. We'll be releasing something soon." HaHa, did you get how I threw in that "soon?" I couldn't help myself. I'm hoping he's too busy doing real work to answer my question in a real way. Anyway, it's nice to see a quick response to a customer question.

So, now what? I'm waiting impatiently. I've rationalized away my fears using percentages of market. I saw that the card is indeed for sale. I'll wait to move. Previously, I was going to wait til June 2011, but I think I'm going with June 2012 now before I sell. I want to give them some time to ramp up and see what happens. That will put me at the eight year mark roughly for having held onto this thing. Good things come to people who wait, right? If only all this money had gone into gold in 2003!

I'm hoping to see some PR of some sort by Oct 15, but I'm certainly not holding my breath.