I wonder if this isn't just a little eddy in the stupendously huge infotech hurricane engulfing humanity. Not that it seems specially evident while sitting in a bus in a traffic jam or wandering in the corn fields in France or planting rice in the paddies of India.
Telecom99 looked like a human atom bomb to me, with 6bn people reaching some sort of critical mass.
Now the land rush is on. Claims are being staked all over the place, now in $100bn takeovers. $6bn wild spectrum offers for NextWave spectrum, which owes more to deceitful game playing than a genuine bid, but is indicative of what's going on nevertheless. Q! forming a big cash haul which will NOT be used to takeover some horseshoe maker or hamburger joint.
Spectrum, patents, infrastructure and handheld devices. There will be a tumult of ASICs, fibre, photons, software, electronic gizzardry, joint ventures and maybe yet wars over all this. Verbal [spoken or written] communication is about the biggest thing humans do [after eating and reproducing].
The century old twisted pair artifact has had its day. So has the state possession of that artifact and the obscene monopolistic state sponsored repression of telecommunications development. My wife nearly died a couple of decades ago thanks to the New Zealand state-owned telephone monopoly which was too lazy, greedy and stupid to provide phones and which created a waiting list whether people could afford service or not.
What's it worth to communicate? I value it highly. Sometimes a call is worth one's life. I am paying thousands of dollars a year in puters and services. The real cost of providing my communication needs is a hundred or two dollars a year. There is a colossal profit to be made before competition erodes the cash flows down to the low levels the cost of fibre, silicon/germanium, plastic and fuel cells really needs when it's a a Dow type business.
It will take 10s of trillions of dollars hundreds of billions, or trillions in profits before communication needs for 6bn people are complete. Say, 6bn people times $1000 per person, that's $6tn just for the basics. Never mind devices, which will be upgraded yearly and which will multiply in huge profusion from Coca Cola dispensers, to EarCell [TM] in your ear cell phones, to A4 sized readers, sunglasses type 3D viewers, with satellite links and a whole panoply of stuff.
Total spend will be something nearer $10,000 per person over 20 or 30 years [comets, wars and the other horses of the apocalypse notwithstanding]. Gee, $10,000 might be modest but competition will erode it a bit I suppose. It's all a guess. $60tn is a LOT of money, even for Mighty Q! stockholders.
I'm not sure that Qualcomm and Leap have finished their moves. Microsoft looked as though it had in the early 90s. Well, guess what. And Microsoft was only goofiing around with a few 10s of millions of computers.
We are talking billions of gadgets and software in the WWeb before IT will feel happy that things are running smoothly.
Leap leaping is presumably a result of people realizing that this CDMA stuff, spectrum and phone service is very valuable and HDR/CDMA companies will make a lot of money. Maybe it's just another takeover in action.
Anyway, I'm having fun.
Mqurice |
