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Technology Stocks : The New Qualcomm - a S&P500 company

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To: Bux who wrote (3813)	12/1/1999 3:20:00 AM
From: engineer	Read Replies (4) of 13582

The cellular carriers were pretty near maxed out in 1994 when CDMa rolled out. What they were doing was taking 57 call channels and replacing them with about 700 call channels in a single analog cell site by upgrading to CDMA. this bought them capacity IF they replaced all the analog phones wiht CDMA. they have not done this. then along came 3 and 6 sectored cells and they got to make that number more like 1200-1500 calls. Today they are still approaching saturation and 1xrtt will give them back a factor of 2. the cellular carriers have 12.5 Mhz each. Most of them have old analog cellular tower spacing which were planned on 3 watts phones, not 200 mW phones. the cell radius were more like 7 miles and not the present 7-8 km ones we are seeing in the new PCS converage plans. Alot of the carriers have been trying to add cells, but this is by far the hardest part. the scenario that Lance put forth is ok in a world where you can just place transmitters at will, but thus we do not have a perfect world and you cannot due to NIMBY. So the carriers have to struggle with permits and city councils and the likes to get a few more towers. Coverage is getting pretty tight. I am somewhat sure that the reason that the Internet has not been rolled out in San Diego and LA is that it is saturated and they have no spectrum to allow for data minutes. IF they wanted to do this and they rolled out a mjaor plan to replace every analog phone out there, then they gain back the space. the name of the game is cpaacity in all instances. Any increase in cpacoty allows you to sell more analog or digital phones and get more airtime minutes. the more capacity you have the cheaper your equipment costs become and the lower the price on your handsets. A good way to check capacity is to go to a high use area at rush hour and try to place a call. If you get a fast busy on the phone, then they are saturated. Go to I-5 and I-805 merge in San diego on any night at 6:oo PM and you will get a total call block on both AirTouch and GTE. Or is you keep getting assinged very poor call quality lines during that time. This means they are scraping the bottom opf the barrle to get the call out, eventhough the line may not test out to be perfect or they may be pushing the Bit Error Rate levels a bit. On teh AT&T cash..Perhaps they really are funding their Onerate plan out of raids on the company's other cash cows, but this can only go on for so long. I look at this as they have not invested yet in CDMA, but are starving hte cow to keep from doing it. the bad news here is that they may hit a crunch that finally gets all the way back ot teh shareholders and they have to admit they have a deficit. the predecessor to Armstrong (Allen) was great at coming up with a divestiture or acquisition every year or two to hide a couple of billion of losses he racked up. I would examine the balance sheet pretty carefully if I had any of their shares.

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