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To: cfoe who wrote (4680)	12/30/1999 3:45:00 PM
From: lkj	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13582

Lucent's directional multi-antenna design was meant for fixed wireless, but there is no restriction that it has to be that way. All it takes is A LOT MOORE processing power to be applied to mobile. If we go down to 0.02 micron in the next few years, as some people in the semiconductor industry are predicting, Moore's law can be easily surpassed. Giving 100 times the processing power with energy consumption comparable to today's chips, Lucent's directional antenna may very well be applied to mobile, and this technology can start by using 2 antenna and move to higher counts later. Somewhere in my memory tells me that Lucent is already applying this technology on TDMA systems for AT&T. Here is a brief on this technology, and please, appreciate how important this finding was. CDMA took spread spectrum a step further. This technology took the whole wireless communication world a step further. bell-labs.com BLAST Technical Background -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BLAST is a wireless communications technique, which uses multi-element antennas at both transmitter and receiver to permit transmission rates far in excess of those possible using conventional techniques. In wireless systems, radio waves do not propagate simply from transmit antenna to receive antenna, but bounce and scatter wildly off objects in the environment. This scattering is known as "multipath", as it results in multiple copies ("images") of the transmitted signal arriving at the receiver via different scattered paths. In conventional wireless systems, multipath represents an impairment to accurate transmission, because the images arrive at the receiver at slightly different times and can thus interfere destructively, canceling each other out. For this reason, multipath is traditionally viewed as a serious impairment. Using the BLAST approach however, it is possible to exploit multipath -- that is, to use the scattering characteristics of the propagation environment to enhance, rather than degrade, transmission accuracy by treating the multiplicity of scattering paths as separate parallel subchannels. BLAST accomplishes this by splitting a single user's data stream into multiple substreams and using an array of transmitter antennas to simultaneously launch the parallel substreams. All the substreams are transmitted in the same frequency band, so spectrum is used very efficiently. Since the user's data is being sent in parallel over multiple antennas, the effective transmission rate is increased in roughly in proportion to the number of transmitter antennas used. At the receiver, an array of antennas is again used to pick up the multiple transmitted substreams and their scattered images. Each receiving antenna "sees" all of the transmitted substreams superimposed, not separately. However, if the multipath scattering is sufficient, then the multiple substreams are all scattered differently, since they originate from different transmit antennas that are located at slightly different points in space. Using sophisticated signal processing, these differences in scattering of the substreams allow the substreams to be identified and recovered. In effect, the unavoidable multipath in wireless communication offers a very useful spatial parallelism that is used to greatly improve bit-rates. Thus, when using the BLAST technique, the more multipath, the better, just the opposite of conventional systems. The BLAST signal processing algorithms used at the receiver are the heart of the technique. At the bank of receiving antennas, high-speed signal processors look at all the signals from all the receiver antennas simultaneously, first extracting the strongest substream from the morass, then proceeding with the remaining weaker signals, which are easier to recover once the stronger signals have been removed as a source of interference. Again, the ability to separate the substreams depends on the differences in the way the different substreams propagate through the environment. Under the widely used theoretical assumption of independent Rayleigh scattering, the theoretical capacity of the BLAST architecture grows roughly linearly with the number of antennas, even when the total transmitted power is held constant. In the real world of course, scattering will be less favorable than the independent Rayleigh distributed assumption, and it remains to be seen how much capacity is actually available in various propagation environments. Nevertheless, even in relatively poor scattering environments, BLAST should be able to provide significantly higher capacities than conventional architectures. A laboratory prototype has already demonstrated spectral efficiencies of 20 to 40 bits per second per Hertz of bandwidth, numbers that are simply unattainable using standard techniques.

To: cfoe who wrote (4680)	12/30/1999 3:58:00 PM
From: lkj	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

As to eventual volumes and average prices, you are correct that no one knows. However, remember that we are not talking about phones only anymore. We are no talking about hundreds, maybe thousands, of digital appliances that will include a CDMA ASIC; especially by 2001 with HDR. You are right. Anything with HDR should be called a modem rather than a handset. If HDR does take over the world, it will not be in every device. It will act as a gateway for a whole bunch of local devices. These local devices will be equiped with technologies such as BlueTooth, not any sort of CDMA technology. Khan

To: cfoe who wrote (4680)	12/30/1999 11:37:00 PM
From: llwk7051@aol.com	Respond to of 13582

cfoent, Interesting article.Japanese Use Cell Phones To Surf Updated 4:04 PM ET December 30, 1999 By GINNY PARKER, Associated Press Writer TOKYO (AP) - Yuya Kato uses the Net to go surfing - in the ocean. Thanks to his new mobile phone, Kato is able to quickly view simple Web information on weather, wind speed and wave heights at his favorite beach. "I rarely use this phone for talking," said Kato, who works for a Tokyo film distributor and hits the beach on the weekends. "I just get on, get the information I want and get off." So much for conventional Web surfing. Despite its love for just about everything high-tech, Japan has been surprisingly slow to go online, lagging behind Europe and the United States in Internet use. But the nation has been one of the fastest to get hooked on cell phones - and a new generation of mobile devices with Internet capabilities is setting off a revolution that could put Japan on the fore of cyberspace. Japan's passion for the portable phone is legendary. There are over 53 million of them in use - meaning about two for every five Japanese. But only about 11 percent of Japanese homes are connected to the Internet, compared to 37 percent in the United States. The main reason is cost. Fees for local calls in Japan make it expensive to go online via conventional telephones, unlike the U.S. where the call is generally free. And Japanese consumers have been slow to buy personal computers, the main route to the Internet. Net phones, introduced here for the first time in February, solve these problems. They cost little more than regular mobile phones, and users are charged only for the information they download. For the price of a new handset and an extra few hundred yen (a few dollars) a month, the average user gains access to everything from movie listings to news headlines to video games. "The mobile Internet has very substantial potential in Japan," Merrill Lynch senior analyst Mahendra Negi wrote in a recent report. He said that the trend could help Japan catch up to U.S. Internet usage. Japan also could open up an important technological front. To make Web phones, software developers need to refit Web pages to a business-card size screen. The challenge is easier for Japanese developers, who already have crammed multiple functions and crystal-clear LCD screens into some of the world's tiniest digital handsets. The United States, meanwhile, is struggling with the transition, and is just starting to test Web phones for consumers. Part of the problem is the plethora of U.S. mobile phone standards. Japan, on the other hand, will become in 2001 the first country to launch an advanced "third generation" Web phone, which will offer faster Internet access and video display, as well as allow callers to use the same number and handset worldwide. Japan won't control the industry, since the international community is moving toward a global standard for mobile service designed to prevent any one country's dominance. But the nation's knack for miniaturizing mobile phones may one day be in high demand all over the world. Leading the movement is Japan's top telecommunications firm, NTT DoCoMo. The company in February introduced its "i-mode" service, which allows users to log onto the Internet for about $2.90, plus a charge based on the volume of information that is downloaded. So far, the service has nearly 3 million subscribers, and industry forecasts predict the number could reach 4.5 million over the next three months. "From here on out, the number of people on the Internet via cell phones is only going to go up," said Mitsuhiro Kurano, a spokesman for rival Japan Telecom, which on Dec. 10 launched its own Internet-capable phone. But the Internet development will be different from that in the United States, where online services are tailored to large-screen browsing on personal computers. "Because the screen is so small, the focus will be on text and information rather than graphics," he said. Robert