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To: Peter Sherman who wrote (67517)	2/18/2000 10:06:00 PM
From: Boplicity	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

I believe they all have me on ignore, I keep asking question and getting no response. I ask one about ARMHY and the possibility of QCOM MSN chipset leaving them out of the picture, never did get an ans. That is happening more now, I'll just never be one of the in crowd... lets not go there.. forget it.. Greg

To: Peter Sherman who wrote (67517)	2/18/2000 10:41:00 PM
From: Ruffian	Respond to of 152472

You'll see more activity out of the Asia Pacific region, in particular in China. Everybody is watching this CDMA rollout with China Unicom and I think that is a critical opportunity both for CDMA and for Lucent.> Expanding Lucent's Wireless Networks William Wiberg has been president of Lucent's Cellular and PCS Wireless Networks unit since February 1998. He is at the cellular network's helm as the company is chasing new equipment contracts worldwide and likely looking at acquisitions to bolster its IP-based services portfolio. He recently spoke with Brad Smith, Wireless Week's Data/IP editor, about the company's outlook for global expansion, wireless data and other issues. Wireless Week: What are the challenges and opportunities for the industry in 2000? Wiberg: The opportunity is really simple. It is the growth that continues in the market and the demand globally for wireless services. The challenge is maintaining and improving the quality of service to meet growing expectations from the wireless customer. The challenge with that is keeping up with voice capacity demands worldwide, but at the same time preparing for the advent of wireless data. Wireless data is a tremendous opportunity just in terms of broadening the portfolio. The success of wireless data is largely dependent on the simplicity of the user interface. [It needs] to be intuitive and compelling. WW: How do you meet that challenge of simplicity? Wiberg: Several dimensions. Some with the wireless service providers and how they bring services to market. And some with the collection of component suppliers of an overall end-to-end solution for wireless data, those being the end-user devices, the network piece which I think is so critical and then the variety of content providers who are aggressively moving into the wireless data area. We spend a significant amount of time knitting together that triad. WW: The network is a complex puzzle. Carriers seek multiple vendors. One of the answers is interoperability, but how do you achieve that? Wiberg: This whole area of open network architecture is critical for value creation on the network side. There are many dimensions to open interfaces and open architecture, some of which are straightforward, like the multi-vendor interoperability both at the network level which we continue to be leaders in-that's the IS-41 connectivity between systems-and all over the world we have multi-vendor systems in place. More recently [we announced] the base station-to-switch interoperability using the IOS spec, as it is called, and we went into commercial service at the end of last year in that kind of mixed environment with Lucent switching equipment and other vendor's base stations. That's only facilitating the transport piece. We are leaders in openness with our inter-network interoperability and now our IOS compliant interface for taking Lucent switching and interworking with other base stations. Probably more important than that is the service creation aspect of the applications piece. WW: What are Lucent's specific challenges and opportunities in 2000? Wiberg: The leading penetration markets of the world people are running at 60-plus percent penetration. In the leading subscriber markets of the world such as the U.S. we're still seeing penetration in the 30 percent area. So one thing you see on the voice side is great head room in the biggest markets in terms of penetration, using the other world markets as a pattern. That multiplies the increase in minutes of use per subscriber that we're seeing everywhere, partly due to bundling plans on the pricing side but partly due to the fact that wireless phones are becoming mass market consumer products that are a primary source of communications. The voice growth is terrific; the data growth is an overlay on top of that. [Specifically, we will] build out our strengths in the North American market and our growing strengths in the Caribbean and Latin American markets. Also strengthening our position as the economies recover in Asia. Examples of that would be the big GSM buildout we're doing on a national basis in Australia with One.Tel Ltd. You'll see more activity out of the Asia Pacific region, in particular in China. Everybody is watching this CDMA rollout with China Unicom and I think that is a critical opportunity both for CDMA and for Lucent. There are European and Middle East opportunities, especially with our GSM products. WW: The growth of wireless networks has been phenomenal. Do you see it slowing down? Wiberg: I see the pacing continuing, [for] two reasons. One is the continued capacity demands being placed on networks due to increases in wireless voice use driven by voice penetration and increasing minutes of use per subscriber. And then there is the advent of wireless data services. You can see it in the consumer marketing going on in the United States today. In other parts of the world, wireless data is a major consumer force. The opportunities continue with the evolutions to third- generation systems with higher speed data rates and, with that, new applications. WW: In North America, what are the trends in network infrastructure build-outs? How is Lucent meeting them? Wiberg: With existing carriers, one trend is consolidation as companies through acquisition or partnership are gaining broader national footprints. That drives usage. The thing we work very hard on is being flexible and responsive from a capacity perspective so that we can keep up with growing and sometimes unpredictable demand of these very large networks. We will continue to support our customers as they improve both coverage and capacity within their networks and continue their investment forward. WW: Lucent completed its $24 billion acquisition of networking company Ascend Communications last June. Can you update us on the integration of the two companies? How has the combination started to pay off? Wiberg: In terms of its integration into Lucent, Ascend has been a great success in terms of market position and revenue growth on the data side. We don't normally break down segment reporting on a product basis, but in the January earnings announcement there were some specific statements made about growth in the quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year growth in the data market. The growth has been terrific. Second, the Ascend products are being used today within our network architecture, for example in the interconnection between switches in a CDMA environment allowing us to have a seamless inter-switch soft-handoff which has been fundamental to our architecture right from the beginning. We have a very specific plan to migrate our customers and new customers from the circuit paradigm to a packet paradigm within the network. It is largely an alignment of the data networking products, including Ascend within Lucent, with our wireless portfolio to allow for that. That includes both IP and ATM products. The last part is very tactical-how we present ourselves to our customers. One of the things that has just occurred has been an integration of the Ascend sales force with the rest of the sales force for the products that we sell for global operators, just to simplify and unify the face we show to our customer set. That's a natural step in the full integration of Ascend. WW: What's your vision of the future of wireless data? Carriers will begin migrating to packet networks this year and higher data rates. Will the demand be there from the consumer side? Wiberg: Again, the challenge is having these simple and compelling applications for the end user. They're out there. But the real power here is that there are thousands, literally thousands of software houses out there that are building Internet applications today and as we make them more mobile aware and give them better windows into a mobile network from both a transport and subscriber information perspective, they will all be engaged. The power here is not me figuring out what the data applications are going to be. The power here is that you have thousands of people who are dealing with new Internet ideas each day and that when they do it they think about mobility. If we make that happen, will the applications come? Absolutely. You provide openness on the network and that's what we're doing. When you think about the wireless Internet there is the data aspect but there is a not-data aspect. That's the backbone network transitioning to packet, be it ATM or IP, and it provides some good economies for voice as well as for data. That's part of our network evolution story. The thing that I think is exciting is that within our business right now we have been going down many parallel paths and knitting together all the things that I believe are necessary to bring that value in the end to our customers, the service providers, and to their customers, the end users. There's going to be a good opportunity for me to talk about that at Wireless 2000. There's going to be a lot of things we have at the show and the announcements we are making and you'll see many things on the show floor oriented around the wireless Internet.