Lounging around in the Telecosm
Yes, your timing was terrible, but the good news is that timing hardly matters for the stocks you hold. The view from the noggin nebulae is that Globalstar will either go broke (unlikely short of a Greenspan killer spasm) or become a tenner or better; Novell will not go broke and is perfectly situated for the storewidth paradigm (execution will tell); Global Crossing will double or more; JDSU is the spearhead of the fastest advancing technology in history; and Qualcomm is increasing its technical lead in perhaps the fastest growing business in history. Hold on and enjoy the ride. 6/15/00
A response on LWIN
CDMA is not merely a feature of Cricket, it is the bug itself. Only by using the far superior capacity of CDMA could LEAP compete with local exchange carriers wirelessly as they are doing in Chatanooga and a couple other cities. ATT can't do it at all despite their big plans for Angel. However, I cannot knowledgably comment on the value of the LEAP stock. Sprint, Verizon, or other CDMA companies could compete in the same space if they wished, so I would suppose that LEAP would have to move faster than anyone else. If they don't have the money, their prospects are tricky at best. 6/15/00
But has the Forum noticed the IPO of Carver Mead's hearing aid company, based on a model of the cochlea similar to the retinal model which yielded Foveon? The name of the company is Sonic Innovations, of Salt Lake City (there are many Sonics, so take care). It has a genuinely original and superior product based on the insight of a genius.
Also, a company called WFI in San Diego is targeting turnkey deployment and maintenance of 3G wireless solutions. All the telcos are baffled by the complexities of 3G and WFI has an overwhelming backlog and a superb staff of savvy engineers. 6/15/00
The power control system, as I recall, has three layers--the first, which is described here, is a coarse automatic gain control which moves the power up and down 25 percent according to the needs of the base station. There are also
two levels of more refined power regulation some 800 times a second. It is Qualcomm's mastery of power control that enabled the creation of High Data Rate (HDR), which is based on a weighted fair queuing algorithm which grants the user with the strongest signal a conditional preference in
transmission.
But power control is only one of Qualcomm's unique assets in doing CDMA. Most important will prove to be its experience in integrating all these CDMA functions in working systems. I think it is likely that Qualcomm will dominate the chip sets for both WCDMA and CDMA2000. 6/18/00
My favorite at the moment is Avanex. But even Avanex does not offer the huge possible gains that Globalstar promises the moment it becomes clear that its many giant partners will not let it go bankrupt. Of course, Globalstar is a high risk play because of the financial perils. But I don't see anything else (except possibly Avanex) with the obvious upside. 6/18/00
Fortune has been fawning over GSM and the wonders of governmentally mandated wireless standards ever since Qualcomm impudently launched a better system. I use Sprint everywhere and so does most of my office and family. I don't know what exactly ticked off cousin Stew in Fortune,
but his columniary stance is constant pique. However Sprint
is steadily gaining share on everyone else. A key problem
in expanding service areas is environmental hostility to
antennas.
Addressing such problems is WFI (Wireless Facilities Inc) of La Jolla, which installs and maintains wireless systems and specializes in 3G. It is one of the most impressive
companies I have recently visited (though not particularly paradigmatic since it maintains "agnosticism" between CDMA
and TDMA and works at times for AWE (Ugh!). 6/18/00
Look, folks, approximately a trillion dollars will be spent on rebuilding the global communications infrastructure in the image of lambda (wavelength) circuits. From the campus to the global network, Avanex commands the only coherent and robust solution. Perhaps they will be eclipsed, but they are ahead of everyone today, including Corvis, Q-Tera, Cisco, whoever, and Simon Cao actually grasps the paradigm picture in all its radical meaning. Global Crossing also is a unique company with a compelling strategy and its value will also be recognized. 6/19/00
Question on Asynchronous Digital Design article in Red Herring
Yes, this company is a spinout from Caltech, founded by a paradigmatic Carver Mead student, Andrew Lines, who has been inventing stuff since he was 12. It has had a couple rounds of funding. What does Red Herring say? I am an enthusiast for the concept and Andrew has it worked
out as well as anyone. All chips will eventually have to
throw away the clock. 6/19/00
I had to spend much of my time preparing the new letter (to be posted Tuesday), doing an interview for ASAP on optics, and ginning up a speech on the power paradigm, so I don't know much about the companies, except that Power One was a hit. The agenda is available on www.powercosm.com.
The optical panel was a summit conference between Simon Cao
of Avanex, Rajiv Ramaswami of Xros/Nortel, and Greg Amadon
of Terabeam, who had to face an intense grilling from the
passionaria physicist of Lightpointe, who declared that the
Terabeam system violates the laws of physics (in particular,
Snell's Law, on the angle of incidence of the light; she
said Terabeam would only work with perpendicular rays). Here
we go again.
Amadon said, "Hey, it works."
Cao explained the Avanex powermux and showed how it scaled
all the way from the office through the long haul. He also
declared that the "power shaper" obviates the Raman
amplifiers used in the Corvis and Q-tera applications, and
comes at half the price and a tenth the complexity (Q-tera
uses an equisitely sensitive combination of Raman and
Solitons; Corvis is not saying what they do). Integrated
with each EDFA the power shaper reduces dispersion to the
point that Raman is unneeded for 3000 kilometer distances
without any optoelectronics. No company is so attuned to the
paradigm.
Lucid and learned as ever, Rajiv showed how the all optical
network was moving forward faster than expected on all fronts. 6/19/00
The July letter will be a review issue.
The noggin nebulae companies to investigate while I am away are WFI of La Jolla (WFII), a super 3G wireless outsource facilities and maintenance play, and Sonic Innovations of Salt Lake, a hearing aid company based on Carver Mead's model of the cochlea (as the sensational Foveon camera--see past GTRs--is based on his model of the retina). Sonic just came public, and although it is not a Telecosm company, anything with Carver's guidance is exciting. This is the first hearing aid that does not amplify all sounds that impinge on it indiscriminately. Instead it works like human hearing with directional cues. 6/19/00
We are going to try to give ATT some more advice in the WSJ over the next few weeks. They own 10 megahertz of spectrum nationally for their wireless local loop fallen "angel" project. They could adapt that for CDMA 3G and lead the world. But instead these guys are investing some $250 million in a new TV advertising campaign to upgrade the image of TDMA and are paying $.50 per minute to other carriers for roaming and getting $.08 cents from their
customers. 6/19/00
Designed chiefly to meet the challenge of high frequency communications, all these semiconductor materials are gaining share as the industry moves up-spectrum toward microwaves in the gigahertz frequencies (under one micron in wavelength). Engineered with a band gap (distance between its valence or non excited state and conduction bands) that allows it to emit light waves below one micron in length, gallium arsenide plays a key role in optics (though indium phosphide is better for the infrared bands above one micron in length used in most fiber systems). Silicon germanium is low powered, microwave frequency, and manufacturable with the same capital equipment used in ordinary chips. Silicon on insulator designates an array of designs that employ materials other than the supremely convenient silicon dioxide to insulate the chip during operation and protect it from chemical contamination during manufacture. All these more expensive materials have to compete with ordinary CMOS devices which engineers constantly push toward microwave performance. The GTR has focused on Silicon Germanium as a paradigmatic process, though, because it combines very low power high frequency operation with the learning curve of ordinary silicon microelectronics. IBM (which invented it in its current form) and Atmel have been leaders in silicon germanium.
6/21/00
My view, often stated, is that far from a high capital cost entrenchment, subject to erosion by terrestrial rivals, Global Star is supremely cheap for a system that will soon command global coverage (and even tropospheric reach, judging from the recent Qualcomm-NewsCorp play). Moreover, Globalstar will improve more rapidly than its rivals with the advance of its earthbound electronics and its currently retarded marketing. In any case, it bailed me out last week, when stuck on a cruise boat in the Baltic and required to submit my book corrections in two days, I discovered that there was an air controllers strike in Paris that would jeopardize delivery of my necessarily hand-edited page proofs (red pencil required by my excellent but still antediluvian publisher). Using a Globalstar phone, I could assure my editor that the corrections were on the way and vitally important (truly egregious errors had crept in as usual during the fact checking process). The Globalstar acoustics were amazing. There are going to be myriad uses for this bandwidth and coverage. 7/3/00
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Asynchronous Digital Design sound interesting. Didn't realize WFII was actually profitable.
Jack |
