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Technology Stocks : WCOM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MasonS who wrote (5312)	11/1/1999 6:06:00 PM
From: petersterling	Respond to of 11568

Is this the one you want? telecom99news.itu.int Wireless Carrier Reportedly Admits Mobile Internet Delay Director of new mobile carrier says third generation mobile networks won't be ready until 2004 Andy Dornan, Data Communications An executive at Orange Personal Communications PLC (London) reportedly said in a speech at Telecom 99 yesterday that third generation mobile services will be delayed by two years, providing one of the first public admissions that the technology won't be ready any time soon. Show attendees said Colin Tucker, a director of Orange, predicted that third generation mobile networks would be rolled out in 2004 --- not by 2002, as previously hoped. Switzerland's third and newest mobile carrier, Orange does not have a booth at the show, but is experimenting with WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) services in Geneva. Plenty of exhibitors are showing off third generation handsets or PDAs at Telecom 99, but all of these are non-functional dummies. Instead, they are showcasing upgrades to existing services, such as GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), which will boost GSM to about 40 kbit/s downstream, and the IS-95b version of cdmaOne, which does the same for the CDMA (Code Division Multiplex Access) systems popular in America and Asia. Even these devices won't be commercially available for about a year. "We are shipping the infrastructure now," explains Philippe Keryer, Radio Systems Director at Alcatel SA (Paris), "but we need to ensure that the terminals are interoperable with other manufacturers' systems." Users take it for granted that every vendor's GSM phones work with every other vendor's infrastructure, and they want to ensure that the same will be true for the new systems. The same isn't true of WAP, the open standard for accessing web pages on a handheld device. The services currently on trial by Switzerland's three mobile networks cannot be accessed by each others' subscribers. Other vendors have based wireless web access on proprietary systems, such as the "web clipping" developed by 3Com Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.), or WAP 1.0, a prototype version of the standard which few companies support. "The WAP community all agreed that WAP 1.0 is not what we want," says Joop Trouwee, Telecom Products manager at software company CMG Telecommunications BV (Utrecht, the Netherlands). Among other improvements, version 1.1 allows WAP traffic to be carried as SMS (Short Messaging Service) data. In theory this could allow subscribers to talk at the same time as they surf the wireless web, though ironically the only WAP 1.1 phone in use at the show --- the 7000 from Nokia Corp. (Espoo, Finland) --- doesn't support this feature.