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To: Jean M. Gauthier who wrote (47320)	11/2/1999 8:17:00 PM
From: JRH	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Wireless users may hit a speed bump infoworld.com Service providers will be unable to fulfill their promises of high-speed wireless services unless technology breakthroughs allow for more efficient use of capacity, according to industry observers. The bandwidth demands of the services, set to start in 2001, are likely to come up against limitations on carriers' radio spectrum and slow the user experience to a crawl under heavy use, the observers said. The coming generation of mobile services are designed to deliver data at rates of 144Kbps, 384Kbps, or even 2Mbps in some locations - a significant improvement over the throughput most users get today on a handset, handheld computer, or cellular modem. E-mail, enterprise, and Web data access, and even video, are among the services this speed may allow. But each user's high-speed service could swallow a big chunk of the available spectrum when the users access large amounts of data. "Carriers want to be able to provide all these high-margin services, but they're going to run into a problem because it decreases the total number of subscribers they can serve at once," said Brian Cotton, an analyst at Frost and Sullivan, in Mountain View, Calif. The services will represent the next generations of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), Time Division Multiple Access, and Global System for Mobile Communications, the major mobile-phone technologies in North America today. They will be rolled out in phases beginning in 2001, and leading to a family of third-generation standards available in 2002 or 2003. Because these are packet-switching services and not traditional circuit switching, each user won't hold on to a portion of spectrum throughout a call or data session. When one user isn't sending packets, another can step in. But if a large number of users try to use the capacity to its fullest at the same time, response could be disappointing, observers said. For example, one mode of CDMA would allow just five high-speed (384Kbps) users to share a single 5-MHz channel. In any metropolitan area, each carrier can only allocate 25 MHz of spectrum to this form of service. Cotton says that vendors are working hard to develop ways to use spectrum more efficiently. One IS manager is optimistic that mobile employees in his company will use high-speed services to access back-end enterprise data. "I'm not concerned with shared spectrum at this point, because I'm assuming they'll roll out the services intelligently," said John Weaver, vice president of information technology at Elektra Entertainment Group, in New York. But if the new services are a smash, mass deployment could hit carriers hard. If the technology comes up short, analysts said, carriers may deploy higher-speed service only in selected areas such as airports, where demand is high. Users elsewhere would be limited to 144Kbps service. "The problems are understood," said Peter Bernstein, president of Infonautics Consulting, in Ramsey, N.J. "The hope is that they understand the science enough that they'll get the fix in before the technology is widely deployed." An executive at telecom equipment maker Ericsson said that because the systems will switch packets instead of circuits, they should scale up easily. Also, applications for handsets will not demand a full 384Kbps for some time, the executive said. Ericsson is researching advances for more efficient use of spectrum, he added, but major advances will have to wait for the fourth generation of wireless, perhaps 10 years from now. ******************************** Cheers, and congrats on today's earnings everyone!! Justin