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

To: shoe who wrote (2040)	1/27/2000 1:01:00 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3376

Shoe, This technology tutorial from the Internation Engineering Consortium (IEC) should help to clear most of the myths: webproforum.com A superconductivity vendor like Conductus has this explantion of the coverage holes that occurs in any base station coverage provided by analog, 2g TDMA/GSM/CDMA and 3g WCDMA/CDMA2000. I don't know if cryogenically-cooled superconductive wireless amplifiers and filters have benefits for a spread spectrum-based mesh network like Ricochet. conductus.com The fact still remains that the performance gap between 2g TDMA/GSM and 2g CDMA is narrowing while the cost advantages of TDMA/GSM keep on widening. That obviously favors the upgrade path to WCDMA not CDMA2000. Note also this 12/99 press release on the CDTS web site: Conductus, Inc. (Nasdaq: CDTS), a leading manufacturer of superconducting wireless systems, announced today that the first urban TDMA field trials of its ClearSite system expanded busy-hour capacity by 80% at a major cellular carrier's site in a highly-populated urban area. This improvement represents a potential revenue increase of $300,000 per year, resulting in a payback of the carrier's investment in its ClearSite system within approximately two months. Conductus and other supercondutivity vendors are participating in trials in Japan right now with results expected in the next few weeks.

To: shoe who wrote (2040)	1/27/2000 5:53:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Respond to of 3376

shoe - Ericsson proposed the WCDMA protocol as a way of getting around having to pay QCOM any royalties. That is what they claimed. The reality is that the real reason was to create FUD. Imagine if they had said 'Yep, CDMA-2000 is the future'. All of a sudden their GSM sales would have dried up in new markets. Who wants to order GSM when, in 3 or 4 years you'll have to rip most of it out to upgrade to a 3g CDMA system when the alternative is to install CDMAOne now and pay a minimal amount for an upgrade to 3g. The actual differences between the two protocols (WCDMA & CDMA2000) were posted on the thread and they were minimal. Actually there are probably quite a few differences. The chip rate difference may not be large, but there are a lot of subtle differences which add up to quite a bit. But there are certain features common to all CDMA (like power control). But, expert posters at the time pointed out, as did QCOM, that the WCDMA changes degraded the quality of transmission. I assumed then, perhaps wrongly, that WCDMA would eventually go away because it was inferior. If you melded together all of the best features of the different W-CDMA's (NTT's, ETSI's, ...) it would probably be pretty good. But of course it would need to be 'tuned' under load in a real city. As for it dying out - not until either the W-CDMA service providers get their butts kicked by the CDMA-2000 service providers, or the people behind W-CDMA start becoming successful in CDMAOne/CDMA-2000. Until then W-CDMA is good FUD. CDMA provided clearer and more reliable transmissions at its higher frequency and also had the capacity to carry a much greater number of simultaneous calls that GSM and TDMA. The more people on a cell system, of any type, the more degraded the performance (less clear, ...). CDMA may get more users on before that happens, but it still happens. Clark