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

To: Gus who wrote (2028)	1/25/2000 9:02:00 AM
From: Robert Rose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3376

Hi Gus: Nice post. I'm an investor attempting to get up to speed on investment opps in wireless. I own qcom and of course am very happy with it. I am now watching mcom because I recently looked into wireless pc-internet access for my second home outside the Seattle area. I am frustrated (but not surprised) to learn that Ricochet is not yet available in Kitsap County(semi-rural area). Nevertheless, this investigation has alerted me to mcom's potential, and I'm becoming quite excited about it. What do you (or anyone here) consider to be the most promising investments in Wireless? tia, Rob

To: Gus who wrote (2028)	1/25/2000 1:17:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3376

Gus - MCOM has major time to market advantages that allows it to go after the significant road warrior (with laptops) population of Corporate America. ... GSM to WCDMA makes superior economic sense given the massive economies of scale accumulating daily?[As does CDMAOne vs Ricochet] You can't have it both ways. (And neither can I). The difference here is that: Given that CDMA-2000 will come to market 1 to 3 years before W-CDMA (my guess is 2 years), albeit possibly to a somewhat smaller market (a CDMAOne market 1/4 to 1/3 the size of GSM), I believe that by the time W-CDMA is available it will actually have less economy of scale since CDMA-2000 will already be shipping many millions of units per month. The more W-CDMA slips, the more true this is. To some degree the same can be said of CDMA-2000 (or HDR) vs Ricochet, but the difference is that the difference in market share is not 1/4 to 1/3 but 1/1000. All one has to do is hook up to a search engine and look up "MIT and Oxygen" or go to the Akamai.com web site to get up to speed on what the hell I'm talking about. Oxygen is so famous it turned up noplace in a web search at HotBot (which I did yesterday before posting). But now I have managed to find some info. Seamless, everywhere, communications will indeed require the use of satellites. But it does not mean that you will use satellites where user density is high. Satellites are inherently expensive (on-orbit redundancy vs terrestrial maintenance) and naturally cover relatively large areas and are thus capacity constrained. (Note: As an aside, assuming that your argument that 'satellites are a threat the HDR/CDMA-2000' is valid, what about the same argument against Ricochet?) Wait for the conference call to get confirmation from QCOM that the question of 3g royalties is in limbo because of its opposition to the 3g Patent Platform and the implied freedom to pick and choose component CDMA technologies. Perhaps. Hence HDR. It's too bad those spoiled GSM providers can't see clear to pony up and stop holding up the 3g process <g>. (there are two sides to every coin). Of course, they can't even settle within W-CDMA by itself independent of Qualcomm's IPR. Qualcomm is the most experienced manufacturer of CDMA chipsets ergo they are the only source of CDMA technology. No, but for IPR, yes. Tell me how you do mobile cell CDMA without Qualcomm's power control patent, or soft handoff or at least some of the 'lesser' patents. the availability of new materials that introduces new variables into the chipset design process It is probably true that Qualcomm does have some chip design patents, but the air interface and its inherent protocol stack is almost independent of chip design. And Qualcomm has lots of very very good IPR in this arena. Clark PS I take a lot of things vendors - including Qualcomm - say with a large grain of salt, especially sales type stuff (exact number of users per BS, cost advantage vs GSM, ...), but in general Qualcomm's IR stuff has been much more concise and accurate than anyone else's IR.