OT telecom:
The crucial assumption the article makes is where he says, "By the end of the year, just as demand is picking up..." If that happens, then the companies (in telecom equip, and all the chip sectors) who are today investing in state-of-the-art capacity, are going to be sitting pretty. If.
The same sort of situation is happening with the 3G buildout. Various telecoms around the world are spending many billions (DoCoMo is spending 10B$, for instance) to be able to offer high-speed mobile internet access. The problem is, the handsets don't exist, and (more importantly), the applications don't exist. It's a "built it and they will come" plan. They assume demand will be there around the time the capacity is in place, and that's a big assumption, which sometimes is spectacularly wrong (satellite phones are a recent example). If you're wrong, you've spent a huge amount of money on capacity that is essentially worthless (by the time demand returns, your capacity is obsolete).If that money was borrowed, as with so much of the telecom buildout, then the company is bankrupt.
Maybe I'm having a "failure of imagination", but I'm having trouble thinking of a reason why many people will want streaming video on their cellphones. If you have a screen big enough to see anything, and a keyboard big enough to be comfortable, then it's a laptop, not a cellphone. How big is the market for laptops with high-speed wireless modems? |
