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Technology Stocks : METRICOM - Wireless Data Communications -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Caxton Rhodes who wrote (2001)	1/21/2000 4:40:00 PM
From: rrufff	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3376

This is a guy who "personally knows" the technology is better lol. Must have had a long zzzzzzzzzzz before that lunch. You must have been responsible for the drop today. Gee I thought it was options and a bit of profit taking from yesterday's huge runup. MCOM -- on to 125. If you truly are shorting this stock,you should look at the moves and decide if you have enough blood pressure pills - almost no float and increasing demand for the stock as the roll out gets closer = huge increases in price

To: Caxton Rhodes who wrote (2001)	1/23/2000 7:18:00 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3376

I think that when hdr gets deployed it will be immediately dominant. HDR will be in every laptop and data compatible handheld device, including phones that do data Really Caxton. History is full of proof that the best technology is the one that sells and becomes the standard. Look, 2g CDMA only has 10-15% share of the market -- 50 million subscribers worldwide with 3 million in Japan and 24 million in South Korea. The de facto standard is GSM/TDMA which has 350-400 million subscribers and the preferred upgrade path is any combination of GPRS, EDGE and 3g WCDMA. No room there for HDR. QCOM collects less royalties under WCDMA than under CDMA2000. My opinion is that QCOM's ability to make money in ASICs will ultimately depend on its final stance on the 3G Patent Platform guidelines. If QCOM wants to play hardball, it seems probable that the global fraternity of manufacturers and carriers will have a two tier system with QCOM outside (fat royalty check but disappointing ASIC business) and everybody else (with caps on max royalties) under the 3G Patent Platform guidelines. If QCOM accedes to the realities of the symbiotic relationship between manufacturers and carriers in Telecom, it becomes the preferred supplier of CDMA ASICs co-existing with multiple sources of CDMA ASICs. In either case, the competition to dilute QCOM's IPRs will only accelerate once QCOM's building block patents start to expire in 2006. This is just a normal part of doing business. As an aside, take a look at the potential supercarrier IPOs coming down the pike this year: ATT Wireless, Hughes/Boeing (given the popularity and potential of Globalstar) and NTT DoCoMo. Notice something? The largest US wireless operator, ATT Wireless, is TDMA. Remember what C. Michael Armstrong said: N-E-V-E-R. The most successful commercial satellite operator, Hughes/Boeing, is ETDMA (enhanced TDMA) with unique wireless data/voice options once it starts replacing those satellites which have created a pay-TV satellite industry that currently has 12-13% of the pay-tv market. High quality Cash flow begetting more cash flow. The number one Japanese wireless operator, NTT DoCoMo is going straight from PDC to 3g WCDMA early next year. No WCDMA Asic business for QCOM. I wonder why? Agitated South Koreans growing more agitated as they continue to see the prospect of a saturated domestic market and being out-maneuvered out of the WCDMA loop by the North Europeans, the Japanese, the Americans and the Chinese. Any discussion of CDMA vs TDMA tends to get irrational unless one makes a distinction between the spread spectrum foundation of CDMA and the praiseworthy innovations pioneered by QCOM. Spread spectrum has been in the public domain since the 40s. If you check the IBM or the US Patent Office, the building block patents of QCOM's CDMA start to expire in 2006. There are other companies with competing CDMA IPRs, but at the end of the day, it is the manufacturers and the carriers who choose their upgrade path, not QCOM. Odds favor WCDMA over CDMA2000. MCOM is a separate mesh network altogether that can co-exist with CDMA2000 or WCDMA in mobile wireless and the many platforms in fixed wireless. It is not dependent on the unpredictable politics of global broadband as PTTs are being deregulated. It has the financial backing of Paul Allen and WorldCom, which is in the process of buying Sprint, the largest CDMA operator outside of South Korea and the most vulnerable long distance operator to the likes of Bell Atlantic. MCOM also leverages off the rapid advancements in laptops and other handheld devices so its time to market advantages are going to grow geometrically once the network expand. The annoucement by Revolv (Wireless Knowledge JV between Microsoft and Qualcomm) should tell you MCOM is going to be around a long time. The Motorola and Cisco partnership to integrate wireless networks more tightly into hybrid circuit-switching and/or IP based networks around the world should tell you something about the fact that 3G WCDMA or CDMA2000 or Ricochet gets one to the internet and can co-exist in markets big enough and rich enough to accomodate different formats The fact is the internet is a robust network due to the fact that it is actually a network of networks -- redundancies, alternate pathways for packets -- should tell you something about the way the wireless networks will evolve. In the USA, many platforms can co-exist because of the dynamic nature of corporate America and the large middle-class in the consumer market. Most of the rest of the world do not have the luxury and will probably use a combination of the following (descending order of cost per POP): 1) cheapest voice/data - fixed wireless or TDMA. (rural areas) 2) An existing GSM/TDMA network will have the choice of going from 2g GSM/TDMA to 3g WCDMA. (rural/urban areas) 3) An existing CDMAone nework will go 3g CDMA2000 (rural/urban areas) Again, the odds favor WCDMA because GSM/TDMA is the de facto standard. Good luck with your QCOM investment. Truly. But well-funded MCOM is in control of its own destiny and has the potential of collecting Quality of Service premiums. A parallel network that works as MCOM has proven with its 27,000 current customers is always a good thing in the information age. Regards, Gus P.S. A useful frame of reference is the way Lucent and Nortel are outsourcing 30% of their fiber-optic component manufacturing to a supply line led by JDSU/OCLI/ETEK and SDLI. Lucent and Nortel have broad and deep R&D to go with hefty manufacturing assets. Notice how Lucent and Nortel effectively turn most revolutionary developments in broadband to evolutionary upgrade paths for the carriers, 60% of whom have legacy issues? There is pressure of course from new carriers with legacy free networks, but the carriers have the brand and the customer base. That's the kind of tiered relationships between wireless carriers and their trusted manufacturers that are developing on a daily basis. QCOM is now a major CDMA IPR holder and a hopeful ASIC vendor that has go through the big 3 in wireless -- Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson. Lucent, Nortel, and many others have evolving plans. I suspect very few will be pure CDMA2000 players. The scale economics of GSM/TDMA/WCDMA are just too powerful.