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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here

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To: MikeM54321 who wrote (10756)3/22/2001 10:06:01 AM
From: slacker711  Read Replies (1) of 12823
 
It probably means that 3G is a LONG ways off in tech investment time as it's hard to balance a business plan to pay for hundreds of billions of capex with incremental smallish revenue streams that canibilizes voice.

The recent announcements by Sprint PCS and Verizon indicate that it is going to cost them around $2.5B and $5B respectively to move to a 1xrtt/HDR network. Considering the fact that PCS's capex last year was $3B (without any 3G costs)....these dont seem to be backbreaking expenditures.

As for lack of revenue....If you look at narrowband data services, I think you will see two overwhelming successes. One is (obviously) i-mode and the other is SMS messaging. I know that others think that i-mode is the result of Japanese culture (personally, I think it was the business plan/handsets)....but SMS has taken off in every country around the world (except the US). A couple of months ago, Tero estimated that operators in Europe were seeing nearly 10% of their revenue from SMS.

gsmworld.com

The GSM Association is already anticipating that by December 2001, we will be seeing monthly global SMS volumes achieve the 25 billion mark. And over 200 Billion in total for 2001."

Snip

The holiday season and New Year celebrations saw a peak in SMS messaging. The average SMS traffic per GSM customer has grown from 0.4 in 1995 to an average 35 messages per GSM customer per month by end December 2000.

At least for me, the above stats make looking for a killer app for 3G almost useless. I never predicted, and still can't believe, the tremendous success that SMS has had. I figured that noone would want to hunt and peck on a keypad to try and type out a message. Why not just call the person? Yet, just like e-mail in the working world, SMS seems to have changed some social behaviors.

The high-bandwidth equivalent is MMS...it allows sending photos and video clips.

nokia.com

It doesnt seem all that exciting to me....but WDIK?

Slacker
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