Mike,
Re: . And, as of today, mobile wireless data is still VERY confusing to me.
Really, it's quite simple, imagine you are a Japanese teenage girl in six inch platform heels, a miniskirt and you are wandering about with an i-Mode phone drawing cartoons to share with your 120 best email friends. There it is in a nutshell, the reason we need mobile data networks, and why 9600 baud is still the gold standard.
On a slightly more serious note, Andy Seybold, in his Outlook newsletter last fall predicted that it could well be that 2.5G rates would be good enough for quite a long while. While not a visionary thing to say, it struck me as being a very sensible migration from the present state of affairs. While the dreamers tell us about how wonderful 3G is going to be, they hardly ever mention that this is not an evolutionary step, that the new infrastructure that will be required cannot be paid for based on current utilization rates and that until there is some better interface created than the simple keypad on a cell phone, PCS or PDA, that folks are simply not going to find great utility in handhelds, Aether Networks TV ads notwithstanding. Then you have the newest hurdle that the industry created for itself in Great Britain. $35Billion in 3G licensing fees. To which each successful bidder is now going to have to add a completely new, and none too cheap plant to go with. I will predict that within a year we start to see some of these auction winners start to squirm (or is that 'blink'?) and declare bankruptcy, much as we have seen in the US when spectrum auctions got out of hand in the late '90's.
If anyone can throw up any investing ideas, anything at all, please do.
The i-Mode phone is the most successful consumer electronics product introduction in history.
NTT DoCoMo - docomo-usa.org - has recently had to curtail phone sales in certain districts due to over-subscription. DoCoMo is spending billions of dollars, (trillions of yen), this year on R&D. If you want to see what the future of wireless data will look like, I'd pay a lot of attention to what they are coming up with. And then invest in their American imitators. <g>
HTH, Ray
PS. I wonder how much BT wants to charge me for that hyperlink? Will they be able to handle this with OAP&M or are they going to have to create a subsidiary to handle the royalty flow? And why the heck is it newsworthy on CNBC that some British teenager is turning 18? Royalties, grrrr... <vbg> |
