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Technology Stocks : The New Qualcomm - a S&P500 company -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mika Kukkanen who wrote (370)	7/29/1999 1:04:00 PM
From: DaveMG	Respond to of 13582

As I have asked before, who do you think has more capacity: A US operator with cdmaOne/2000 or a European operator with both GSM/GPRS/EDGE and WCDMA? I remember very well that you were the first to bring this up and I understood the meaning at the time. Framing the question the way you just did however is not really relevant for a few reasons, most important being that you haven't included costs in the picture. Question is what will cost/subscriber be? If you are allowed an unlimited amount of spectrum of course you'll have more "capacity". Secondly, NAmerican operators are NOT competing with European operators directly except where they own properties on eachothers" turf,ie Orange PLC is not competing with Sprint, and today I don't really care what you're paying for minutes in the UK, although this could all change a la Vod/ATI merger. Anyway what seems important in all of this to me is that ETSI might wish to avoid the cacophony of standards that we endure in the US and might therefore "mandate", even if unexplicitly, that the existing bands remain GSM/GPRS/EDGE and the new ones be WCDMA so that the question of which upgrade path is most economical becomes essentially moot in Europe. On the other hand it seems that the rest of the world is up for grabs, and for now, despite appearances, perhaps Q is the one with EDGE..And, ironically, if these rumors about CDMA overlays in the US are credible, we might end up with a unified system while Europe lives with GSM/WCDMA.... Dave