Okay Brian, while I'm hot and ranting. < What about this one? Maurice. Is it good for QCOM right away? Or they will do WCDMA and benefit QCOM indirectly.
12/14 19:48
Telecom N.Z Wants to Buy C&W Optus Mobile Assets (Update1)
By Tracy Withers
Wellington, Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Telecom Corp., New Zealand's largest phone company, said it wants to buy the $6.2 billion mobile phone business of Cable & Wireless Optus Ltd.
In September, Sydney-based Optus, Australia's No. 2 phone company, said it would consider offers for its cellular, consumer and data businesses. London-based Cable & Wireless Plc, which owns 53 percent of Optus, wants to focus on corporate and government customers, where profit margins are higher than in consumer telephony.
Chief Executive Theresa Gattung said in a statement that Telecom ``is primarily interested in Optus Mobile although we recognize that any transaction we might undertake would need to be part of the overall restructuring'' of Optus.>
We have analogue, TDMA, GSM [and CDMA now being installed]. We like all the new-fangled stuff. I visited a Vodafone store today and they say they have all the GPRS ready to rumble on their network, but they are just awaiting delivery of handsets, which should be in January.
Telecom operates the TDMA and analogue networks. They had agreed to a huge TDMA expansion but canned it last year in favour of CDMA. CDMA will be ready in May or June for commercial sales. 3G auctions are still running after 5 months - on hold while they figure out what to do next. The total is only US$70 million for 4 lots. auction.med.govt.nz
I think Telecom is going to move quickly to develop new wireless internet technology as soon as they can to squash competitors. They will want to have an Australasian 'look' so that we can easily roam between countries. That will mean an early move to CDMA internet services.
TDMA will die on the vine. Analogue too. We have heaps of spectrum. Australia has already dumped analogue and CDMA largely took over [though those useless marketers, Vodafone, say CDMA stands for Can't Dial Me Anywhere].
I don't know, but my guess is that the Telecom New Zealand CDMA network will be internet-ready and pretty quickly at that! They have Vodafone coming at them with GPRS [if they can get those hot handsets] so they'll want to squash them quickly. Vodafone has gained a lot of ground in the past couple of years while Telecom dithered over buying CDMA.
W-CDMA is going to be a slow road to hell for the GSM world in Australasia in my opinion. I think we'll see the QUALCOMM upgrade path [which I know now includes W-CDMA but you know what I mean]. We'll see it soon and we'll see a lot of it.
Here's Optus:
optus.net.au
They have both CDMA and GSM coverage. I guess they'll go all Telecom style CDMA at some stage.
Mqurice
[Australasia means Australia and New Zealand and bits between such as Lord Howe Island, which is beautiful and not a major CDMA market - I haven't been there but heard about it] lordhowe.com.au
environment.gov.au |
