Negroponte on cell phone industry.
I wouldn't have posted like this here , except the cultural centrist tone of this thread lately has incited me to take it down a notch.
A couple of canadian facts:
1) Alexander Graham Bell was a Canadian. He went south because he could find a market dense enough to flog his concepts. He started it all.
Canadian media personalities do the same today for much the same reason. Most of your news anchors are Canadian.
That includes "the scud stud" - remember him?
2) The death rate in the usa is 8.7 deaths per 1000 of population, in Canada it is 7.39 deaths per 1000 of population.
(
odci.gov )
Nature clearly has nothing, whatsoever, to do with quality of life.
If Greenspan adjusted the central bank rates by the difference in death rates between the two countries the world would be in an economic tailspin, or the investor euphoria of all time. Now,just think about that for a minute.
3) The USA is the third largest country, by area, in the world. The largest two are Canada and Russia. Man that has to put y'all in a world of hurt, eh?
4) The Canadian flag's maple leaf has ten points on it symbolizing the ten provinces that make up the country. The stem points south.
5) Have you guys seen the Molson's "rant" commercial?
The text is here:
ericdavey.homestead.com
(that aired BIG time on Canadian tv last spring)
iam.ca is another link
6) we just had a federal election that determined our prime minister a couple of weeks ago. We knew who had won an hour after the polls closed on the west coast. We are unsure if our neighbours to the south can count, but I am pretty sure if the UN asked us we'd volunteer ElectionsCanada to help y'all out on pretty short notice.
Soooo "Elmatador" and "JustOne" here is a US telco news item
just for you folks down there in that deadly heat. ( and believe me you asked for it ... and i think bloomberg is american , so it must be right, eh? )
quote.bloomberg.com
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
Technology News
12/12 04:53
Negroponte's Cell Phone Talk Causes Indigestion: Mark Gilbert
By Mark Gilbert
Barcelona, Spain, Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- In the banqueting hall of a museum
dedicated to Spanish shipbuilding, about 300 of Credit Suisse First Boston's top
clients sipped coffee and liqueurs as the guest speaker switched on a wireless
microphone.
A founder of the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
a decade ago, Nicholas Negroponte is the author of ``Being Digital,'' a 1995
bestseller on technology and communications that he now recycles on the
lecture circuit.
The assembled investors have lost a ton of money this year on the stocks and
bonds they bought from the phone companies. Negroponte's comments about
the telecom industry at last Thursday's dinner did nothing to help them digest
either those losses or the lobster served earlier in the evening.
Phone companies, the MIT professor argued, are trapped in a race to feed their
customers' addictions for better and faster mobile services. Early next year,
they'll start trying to persuade cell phone users to switch to the new General
Packet Radio Service, a halfway house between current phone technology and
the so-called 3G networks the companies are spending billions of dollars to
build.
If they fail to make a success of GPRS, which provides fast Internet access
through mobile phones and allows users to stay constantly connected, the
phone companies will struggle to raise enough cash to fund the 3G
infrastructure. If they succeed in hooking people on GPRS, however, their
customers might resist yet another expensive shift to 3G.
3G Questions
``People are going to be thrilled by GPRS,'' Negroponte told the assembled
investors. ``Moving them to 3G will be much more questionable.''
So those billions and billions of dollars the audience had invested in phone
companies by buying their stocks and bonds to fund the development of 3G? Not
a smart move, according to Negroponte. Phone companies need to find a new
pricing model, new ways to make money out of their subscribers. Companies
that hang on to charging per bit or per mile or per minute as their key revenue
source are ``dead, they're gone,'' he said.
By now, the guests were taking deep, nervous drags on the after-dinner Cohibas
and Fortunas they'd lit up as coffee was served (none of that ``thou shalt not
smoke in a public place'' nonsense applies in Europe).
Even if the telecommunications operators manage to squeeze more cash out of
their subscribers, their days might be numbered.
Once you have a city full of devices capable of transmitting and receiving,
Negroponte argued, you have a viable network without the need for telecom
towers or other infrastructure. If my phone (or shoe, or jacket, or wristwatch) can
send digital packets to yours via some embedded wireless technology, and
yours can send to hers, then I can send to hers without paying to access the
phone company network.
Informal Networks
The most worrying competition for companies trying to recoup the costs of
building 3G networks ``won't be 4G, it will be informal networks,'' Negroponte
said.
He said he warned U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the
Exchequer Gordon Brown that ``they screwed their grandchildren'' by tailoring the
April U.K. auction to squeeze the maximum possible amount of cash out of the
phone companies. By charging 22.5 billion pounds ($33 billion) for five licenses,
the U.K. government hobbled the telecom industry with a burden that will damage
development of the U.K.'s communications abilities, Negroponte said.
Phone companies have spent about $110 billion so far buying 3G licenses
around the world. But Jippii Group Oyj, a Finnish Internet service provider, has
found a way to transmit those same services via a radio frequency that's available
for free, the Times of London reported, citing Harri Aho, a Jippii vice- president.
Jippii's mobile Internet service, Freedom, is available in Finland and will soon be
rolled out in Frankfurt and London, the paper said.
The company is using software developed by Professor Hannu Kari at Helsinki
University. Sagem SA of France will make mobile handsets compatible with
Freedom, the paper said.
Barbie On-Line
Negroponte also said that pretty soon there will be more things connected to the
Internet -- washing machines, toys, cars - - than people. ``There will be more
Barbie dolls connected to the Internet than Americans.''
He also had bad news for the makers of mobile phone handsets. The Next Big
Thing, according to Negroponte, is printers that don't use ink, but can instead
print electronic circuits. You'll be able to download the blueprint for a new mobile
phone, and print it for yourself. MIT has working prototypes of such printers, he
said, predicting that in five years' time people will be able to ``print'' themselves a
computer costing a dollar.
The dinner at which Negroponte spoke came halfway through a two-day
conference on the corporate bond and credit markets, hosted by CSFB. The
Friday morning sessions focusing on telecom bonds and the outlook for the
phone companies were somewhat subdued. |
