To: moat who wrote (1255 ) 12/15/1999 7:41:00 PM From: Maurice Winn Respond to of 12235
***CDMA and Hong Kong*** Yes indeed, if CDMA didn't fly in Hong Kong, where capacity is the name of the game and millions of people are jammed together, you'd think the capacity business wouldn't matter elsewhere. But a network is much more than just capacity. The handset designs are crucial too and Tero for a long time thought that the GSM handset advantage would be enough to counter the CDMA capacity advantage. He was wrong there apart from where there were well-entrenched GSM systems. In open markets, CDMA cleaned up and GSM lost. That transition is accelerating now that CDMA handsets are fully competitive [more or less] with GSM handsets. In-fill base stations can expand capacity of GSM networks and I suppose there is no limit to how small cell site coverage can be made, but the costs presumably climb in terms of network engineering. I suppose that process has been going on in Hong Kong. Yes, it is obvious that until now, the attractions of CDMA have not been enough to displace the existing systems in Hong Kong. Though a 10-20% market share [if that is what it is] is not too bad you know! New York and Tokyo are similarly dense and in those cities, CDMA is going to be the system. TDMA is in trouble with AT&T who will have to go to CDMA. They surely are not going to hope for the bleeding EDGE to rescue them in Never-Never Land. London, another big city, remains GSM and seems unlikely to go to CDMA until data and WWeb drives it. So the rule seems to be, entrenched GSM can survive, though with large profit drops, in the face of CDMA newcomers. For a little while anyway. GSM in the USA is not doing too well despite a head-start on CDMA. TDMA has huge numbers of dissatisfied customers in the USA. The trend there is clear. The WWeb direction is all CDMA, including Europe, though they hope to save their bacon for a while with GPRS and the bleeding EDGE vapourware bluff. But W-CDMA is admitted as the end-game [though even there they don't surrender and continue the pretence that W-CDMA won't be just a clone of cdma2000 with a few racing stripes]. So, because CDMA in the poor form of the first attempt didn't displace GSM in Hong Kong, we should not conclude much about other areas from that. On point two, the government of Korea forcing CDMA on the citizens, yes, I agree, that was the reason for the success in Korea. No better than GSM in Europe! Luckily for Korea, they made a good choice. Indeed, the economic value of GSM in Europe shows the forcing in Europe to have been a good choice too. In the short run. But in the long run, the real success goes to the wild and crazy relatively free market of the USA. Not that it is in any sense a free market when you consider the legal requirement for price plans to be agreed with government, licenses giving duopolies in wireless, C-Block minority and other silly rules, calling party not paying in the USA due to FCC rules, other stuff.. Europe and Korea both succeeded in a way, but the USA is going to make the most money. Europe is now left with a legacy GSM system and vast payments to be made to USA companies. Ericky, Nokia and others are belatedly trying to get into CDMA. They might do just fine in the end. Sorry, but I didn't mean we have no idea what will happen in Europe, just that Korea and Hong Kong are not good examples of what will happen and why. Korea will be a good example from now on, because once WWeb is on a roll, they are well-developed and are the logical place to start stuff. But things will change fast, and Japan is already catching up, with 7 January start of their 64 kbps notebook services in WWeb. I agree, the idea of simply overlaying European GSM with cdmaOne for voice is unlikely now. It seems more likely to wait for data to do it. It's inevitable, and sooner rather than later. GPRS won't do it because it's too slow and CDMA developments will exceed those of GSM from now on so voice customers will want CDMA. GSM/CDMA multimode handsets would help the switch. Mqurice