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

To: justin55 who wrote (2065)	1/29/2000 4:37:00 AM
From: Clarksterh	Respond to of 3376

justin - did you see the article on 01/27/00 about NTT's current field trials of its WCDMA with SK Telecom in Korea? Does this change your opinion about the near-term commercial feasibility of WCDMA, and any threat it might pose to CDMA-One? Read it again. It isn't a field trial. It was a demonstration. One video phone call does not a trial make, nor does a van a handset make. But it does make for great publicity when properly dressed up. Multicell systems with heavy loading, moving vehicles and operational ASICs are still a long long way away. These are just plain difficult with CDMA. This is not to say that W-CDMA will never be made to work. But on nowhere near the same timeline. As for patents, I haven't looked at the patent position of NTT per se. But I'd be stunned if they had anything in CDMA even remotely as necessary as Qualcomm's patents. (I've been looking for other critical patents in this area for years, and haven't found anything.) This shouldn't be surprising. Qualcomm type patents are rare in the extreme. All JMO Clark