***oops, lots of words again*** Jim, so Vodafone in Newbury is going to overlay some GSM with cdmaOne/cdma2000 while Ericsson is roaring ahead in the 3G-W-CDMA-VW-UMTS-YETI-SETI market by proving that Qualcomm's CDMA technology works in Italy as well as Sweden and probably Japan.
There is an interesting phenomenon involved with CDMA. It seems to scale up or down very easily. By that I mean, a system can function and be economic whatever size it is. Provided that some spectrum is available.
It seems likely that George Gilder's concept of unlimited spectral bandwidth by having radio devices hunting for free spectrum will come about. Much as on an ocean, you don't just allocate a sea lane to one ship, you all crowd in, obey the rules of the road and fit in wherever there is space available at the time, which makes the ocean a very, very big place. A better analogy would be aircraft, because that is a 3D space rather than a curved surface. Give each aircraft a transponder and they never bump into each other.
As analog systems are abandoned, there is going to be a lot of spectrum available in a suitable frequency, allowing good building penetration.
With the cost of gizzards coming down daily, the economics will drive the concept of Steinbrecher boxes, sprinkled like confetti, with none of the burden of hugely expensive land, civil engineering and town planning laws. Some redundancy won't matter too much if the gizzards are cheap enough. Just pop these boxes in attics all over town.
Back to the fractal concept and chaos theories. Fractals, many of you will know, are mathematical concepts which seem to be reflected strongly in nature. A pattern is replicated in larger and larger scale and smaller and smaller with no division. Whatever scale you examine, you see the same sort of pattern. I have to say I'm no authority on them, so I hope the mathematicians among you don't be too harsh on the analogy.
Anyway, my point is you could have an economic cdmaOne or cdma2000 spectrum hunting system which would be valid from a single one way system for a baby monitor up to a solar system size system with everyone connected.
There is some lumpiness of course, such as the cost of handsets, political boundaries, engineering costs of space systems. But those costs and restrictions are reducing quickly. For example, you don't want to spend $500 on a baby monitor if you have to spend another $500 on a mobile phone for round town and another $500 on an international phone for trips to Hawaii. But the intrinsic cost of a handset is nearer zero than $500, so when cheap enough, that lumpiness goes away and convenience and function become important.
My point is that it is hard to find boundaries in the business once costs are lowered by mass production.
Another of Gilder's ideas is 'scarcity'. Scarcity determines value. He has focussed on time as the new scarcity. We don't have time available. We have heaps of gasoline, heaps of steel, heaps of electronics, boats and stuff. But we don't have time. I disagree.
What I've found is not that I'm short of time. I'm short of brainpower. What the world is short of is brainpower. Not time. If my brain functioned better, I could get a lot more done between sunrise and sunset. I can fix that by pulling out a the new Qualcomm Smart Phone = Anita [TM], using the Web to remember, think and even do for me. An adjunct to my brain.
I can also fix it by pulling out a bigger brain. So far, nature has done a passable job albeit very slow and most of us have a decent lump above our eyebrows. But with some DNA hunting and clipping, we can really make it happen.
In the meantime, a smart phone will sell millions. And fractalized cdma2000 systems will proliferate.
Don't be sucked in by Ralph Acompura saying it is now bear time. He was wrong last year and he'll be wrong again this year. Admittedly he did say only a 20% correction. I guess that is quite possible, but after that, it will be back to the races, with a lot of debt financed people feeling chastened and Alan Green$pan printing like mad to stop a derivatives led collapse into a credit spiral with market clearing costs leading into a real hole.
Dow 16000 Feb 2002
Q.com $80 31 August 1998 [Must have been a month ahead of myself in July, though the spike was fun].
Mqurice |
