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Technology Stocks : Wi-LAN Inc. (T.WIN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hatim Zaghloul who wrote (314)	6/26/1999 2:43:00 PM
From: Hatim Zaghloul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16863

Here is a another post from another group. I am posting my answer below it Hello all. Hatim, I was wondering which geographical area Wi-LAN expects to be most successful in, long term. In North America, there is high-speed competition from Bi-Directional Cable and the Telcos wireline offerings. However, in Europe and many other parts of the globe, the same level of wired infrastructure is not present. Do you expect to have an easier time selling Wi-LAN products overseas, because of these reasons. Or, is there some technical feature in wireless technologies that would allow wireless high-speed networks to eventually grow to speeds not practically possible on wired networks? Also, what are the stengths and weaknesses or wireless technology compared to wired? Thanks a lot. RESPONSE: Good questions. Wi-LAN has had good success in Europe because of their per minute charges for local calls which makes the Internet prohibitively expensive. We are working on reducing the price of the unit so that the cost per user is less than $500 (USD). This will break the North American market. It is tempting to say that the third world is the ultimate target. A technology like ours will help the third world leap frog the industralized world in telecommunications. But the third world wants to pay less than $100 per line. We expect to take it to this price level at some point but I do believe you need to get the volume in North America and Europe. I have to be fair and say that if it can be done on the air (from a speed point of view), it must be possible to do it on the wire. Of course, there are costs associated with wires that is not necessarily there for wireless. The biggest advantage of wireless is mobility: wires can never give that. As we bring this technology to the personal digital assistant (PDA) and potentially build networks everywhere, we would be the the product of choice. Other advantages include speed of deployment and scalability. To get one customer with ADSL in a new city would be cost prohibitive. Less than 6GHz fixed wireless could be about $10k. If you have to upgrade the cable infrastructure to way just to pick up a few customers, think again!!! Operators using Wi-LAN products are targeting a 48 hour service. Try to match that with anything else. The biggest problem with wireless is spectrum. Spectrum has become the gold rush of the nineties and zeros (LOL). As a final note, wireless systems can provide higher speeds than wired systems because wires are too costly to lay down. An operator has to think many times before they decide to lay fiber or cable. To use wires properly, standards have to be developed. Standards take a long time to come about which gives wireless an opportunity to overtake it. Thanks for the excellent questions. Hatim