Let me take a stab at that seeing as it appears I'm the only active one on the board. But let me start a little further back than your question, and purely on my opinion and research.
IOTC was formed out of a reverse merger between Solbright Group (the public traded company) and M2M Communications (a private company). Solbright was the surviving entity, but M2M became the largest shareholder, hence the reverse merger. The new company renamed to Iota Communications.
Solbright had background in Solar installations, commercial IoT and SaaS monitoring of those solutions. M2M came from a different background.
Sometime after Sept 11, I don't remember which specific law was passed, but it was determined that emergency users needed to have access to their own spectrum to ensure they did not run into the same communications jams that occurred during Sept 11.
Around the same time, the FCC decided that Sprint was using spectrum it should not be using, and there was an extremely lengthy court battle to force Sprint to move off the spectrum.
Sprint lost the war and the FCC won.
What happened next was a rebranding / defragmenting of the spectrum. As part of the settlement, Sprint had to vacate every channel in every market. This is a massive undertaking for a company with such a large customer base as Sprint had. In addition, they had to move all their customer base to new phones which supported the new frequencies to be used by Sprint.
The FCC launched a massive project for this rebranding effort.
Once Sprint vacated a channel in an area, it would go through a formal process to determine the spectrum was no longer in use. Eventually Sprint would sign off that the spectrum was "clear", and the FCC made this spectrum available to others.
I've posted on this earlier, but in the 80's, the FCC made cellular spectrum available to small investors by way of lottery. This made a lot of small business owners multi-millionaires as cellular technology took off.
Later, the FCC moved to a winner-take-all auction format. This is where the Sprint acquired ClearWire/Verizon/AT&T/Google/DirecTV spent tens of billions of dollars to acquire spectrum in the 90's and 2000's.
The FCC realized they were in effect creating monopolies. Rules were made to limit how much spectrum a company could acquire as part of the Sprint re-branding effort.
A company in Arizona formed SmartComm, a FCC-approved license coordinator. License coordinators understand the technical details of spectrum clearing, testing, proving, etc. In essence, they clear the way for spectrum to be licensed and put to use.
The principals of SmartComm understood the rules put forth by the FCC and how it could be monetized.
Yes, they could get their few channels in each market. But they also recognized the value of using other people's money to take advantage of the opportunity and grow the overall opportunity.
SmartComm helped small investors through the license application process (waiting for FCC clearance, what is available, when can it be applied for, receiving permission to prove business viability in a given market on a given block of frequency, demonstrating results, and obtaining the final FCC license, and all the management that goes in between.
They made this so easy for the investor it was turn-key.
Pay a fee, and SmartComm would take care of the rest.
Once the first or second large batch of licenses were issued by the FCC, SmartComm no longer had a need to be in business, and M2M was launched. M2M would take care of the network build-out and pool all of these investors spectrum into a single network which would lease the spectrum back to M2M. M2M would then monetize the spectrum on behalf of the license holders and pay a lease fee for the rights to the network, the terms of which may or may not have been publicly disclosed, so I can't comment on it until I can find it.
All this can be found on the FCC's website in fragments that have to be pieced together.
So now there is this network of licensed spectrum (very important) with certain characteristics that are critical. From a physics standpoint, the 800 mhz spectrum is very valuable because:
a) it covers a wider area than other technologies. This makes building out a nationwide network and operating it much cheaper because it requires a fraction of the towers and network equipment than the bigger carriers who operate on higher frequencies. Lower operating costs allow for more competitive pricing.
b) 800 mhz travels through buildings much better than higher frequencies. This solves the "last mile" problem faced by other carriers.
IOTA, though their own licenses and their leased network cover 175M of the population (about 55%). The market says that spectrum value will rise significantly when they can cover 95% of the population. With the recent letter from the FCC, this application process can start in July.
With this rebranding of spectrum, it prevented the big carriers from coming in an gobbling up what was available. Only a company like M2M, with it's small business lease holders, could put together a national footprint in licensed spectrum.
So what do you do with this network, once built?
It is perfectly designed for the Internet of Things (IoT). Check the research put out by Gartner, Forrester, Intel, etc. They are predicting a massive wave of IoT devices and services to hit the market over the next 10 years. These devices and services need to run on spectrum.
Licensed spectrum through a single provider is much easier for companies to utilize than fragmented or non-licensed spectrum.
So think through the types of use cases that would use IoT services that run on this spectrum. The categories are wide and vast. Pretty much every industry will be impacted by it.
Easy ones are real estate, utilities, logistics/freight, energy, transportation, etc.
What would happen to this company if they signed a nation-wide contract that allowed them to provide sensors, services and spectrum with a Burlington Rail? Put sensors on every traffic light in New York City, or every city for that matter? Tracked every truck from FedEx? Monitored vast swaths of farmland? Traffic conditions on highways? Energy production in oil fields and solar fields? Energy consumption in real estate? Factory robotic automation? Border security? The list goes on and on.
Add to the fact that their spectrum will best be utilized by IoT devices that are not power hungry, whose battery life can be measured in years, who are not fighting for bandwidth from people watching YouTube and Netflix, etc.
The company is focusing on growing revenues in their services division, primarily in real estate and solar. They are in a waiting period until July when they can start applying for new licenses in recently cleared markets on behalf of their future lease holders. Getting the licenses to be production-approved and ready will take 12-24 months.
Considering the physics behind the network, the limited supply of spectrum, leveraging investment funds from small business owners and investors, pooling spectrum to form a nation-wide network, experience of the CEO at past companies, 215M shares outstanding, a fraction of that in the float.... once they land their first big contract ... look out.
Does that paint a better picture?
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