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To: Jim Lurgio who wrote (2609)	10/31/1999 1:05:00 PM
From: Caxton Rhodes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

That article is moronic, "I feel lost because my only phone is analog." Welcome to the real world Nils, just because dying technologies are the world standard right now, doesn't mean the world is going to stand still just so your phone will work. GEEEEEZ, get a clue Nils Oman. GSM is toast. When its cdma, it doesn't qualify as GSM. Caxton

To: Jim Lurgio who wrote (2609)	11/10/1999 10:21:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

Jim, Nils Oman got it wrong! He wrote: "The article states that cdma2000 is backward-compatible to IS-95 (CDMA). What use is that to 99.9% of the world?s population? If a new worldwide digital standard should be backward-compatible with anything, it should be backward-compatible with GSM, because that?s what the majority of the world uses." Everybody here knows that W-CDMA is NOT backward compatible to GSM. Neither is cdma2000. Both are backward compatible to cdmaOne, though cdma2000 is totally backward compatible whereas W-CDMA is warbly close to it, but only close. The W-CDMA chip rate is wrong, the dual synchronisation effort is pointless and maybe other aspects are not right too. Ericy CDMA division is trying to close the gap as much as they can without getting W-CDMA totally identical to cdma2000. They want to be able to pretend that there is some 'product differentiation' which they can tout to their customers to hope that the customer says "Well, guess we better stick with you guys and W-CDMA rather than that less racing-striped cdma2000". A bit like people buy Texaco instead of Castrol or Amoco engine oil or gasoline though they are pretty much fungible. There is NO merit from a technical point of view in using W-CDMA instead of cdma2000 for GSM network overlays. W-CDMA is no more backward compatible than is cdma2000 for GSM networks. Yes, I know we've been over this 1000 times, but when people keep coming up with it, we have to keep correcting it. It shows how deeply misinformation gets lodged in heads. Maurice

To: Jim Lurgio who wrote (2609)	11/11/1999 12:52:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 34857

<None of my business cards from U.S. executives have a mobile phone number listed. All of my European, Asian, Australian and other non-American business colleagues do. This reflects a sea of difference between mobile cultures in the U.S. and the rest of the world. > Okay then, I'll pick out that quote! That is explained by something which has been recognized in the USA but gets little airtime. Calling party pays. The USA for some weird reason charges the person being called rather than the person placing the call to a cellphone. This is nuts! No wonder they don't put their cellphone number on their business cards. The rest of the world [Finland and New Zealand] bill, or debit, the person calling. If somebody wants to pay the charges, they can get a special number which looks like a normal phone number, but switches to the cellphone, billing the cellphone user. The USA is now struggling [for a year or more so far] with this concept. The service providers would make a LOT more money if they did it right. People would know other people's numbers. Cellphone owners would leave their phones switched on. The cellphone traffic would climb fast. Everyone would be a lot happier [other than the wireline operators]. The other things which these allegedly brilliant marketers struggle with is pricing. Yes, folks, you are about to be inflicted with the short version of instantaneous pricing. They have managed to figure out that people sometimes don't use their phones much and they can generate some business in quiet times by lowering the price. Since a lot of phones are business phones, they can make those phones more attractive to people by giving FREE calling out of business hours. That gives the employee a tax free benefit! It is like a bit extra, taxfree, in their pay packet [not that people have pay packets these days unless we talk IP packets = Internet Protocol Packets]. Companies look for ways of giving employees benefits which don't cost the company anything. Well, they should do, but most companies are dead from the neck up. The other thing which would make service providers a LOT more money is smoothing demand during the peaks by raising the prices at each base station sufficiently to dissuade less urgent or valuable calls from being placed. The base station can measure instantaneous demand and raise or lower prices according to how much capacity it has left. A number of 'commodity traders' who like overall lower prices would sign up to such a service plan - say 30% of them. Not everyone can cope with such a concept. Those who can't cope could have anytime connnection guaranteed and pay through the teeth for such a privilege. They would actually be charged less than dumb competing networks which run at only 20% capacity because they get peaks and frustrated customers. The commodity traders would get really cheap service compared with dumb competing networks, which would go out of business. Already, Craig Farrill [sp?] of AirTouch has said that they will be moving in that direction when they have data filling the spectrum because they need to identify urgent packets and non-urgent packets which can be shipped tomorrow. They are looking for ways to smooth demand, especially when they have the very bursty IP WWeb on the rampage. Watch prices tumble and demand go up extremely fast as the lumbering monster USA sees the light. People have pondered the low USA cellphone adoption rate despite having one of the highest GNPs per person. Now you know. Meanwhile, Nils will soon be using cdmaOne, HDR or cdma2000 in Melbourne and he'll be able to stop moaning about GSM. CU Maurice