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Strategies & Market Trends : Cents and Sensibility - Kimberly and Friends' Consortium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: swisstrader who wrote (78263)	2/23/2000 7:00:00 PM
From: 2MAR$	Respond to of 108040

Qualcomm CEO predicts death of wired phones by 2005.,( go Irwin) LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif., Feb 23 (Reuters) - Five years from now most people will be using wireless telephones for both voice communication and Internet access, not traditional telephones lines, Irwin Mark Jacobs, the chief executive officer of high-flying mobile phone technology company Qualcomm Inc. <QCOM.O> said on Wednesday. "More and more we are going to see a situation where a wire telephone hooked to a wall will become an object of some surprise," Jacobs said at conference held here on the topic of growth company stocks. San Diego-based Qualcomm, which holds a patent on so-called CDMA wireless chips, currently has about 50 million subscribers that use its technology and could add 20-30 million by 2001, the CEO said. CDMA, or code division multiple access, technology takes information contained in a signal and spreads it over a wide bandwidth. More than 75 companies have so far been licensed to use Qualcomm's technology. "Just 15 years ago people said we would be lucky if there were over a million subscribers by the turn of the century," Jacobs noted. But growth has come at a much higher rate due largely to falling per-minute prices for cell phone usage, the CEO said. "We are still not in Europe in any significant way, but even those companies say they should be using CDMA, so hopefully that will change," he added. Currently, the GSM (global system for mobile communications) is the wireless standard that dominates in Europe. Early this month Qualcomm signed a deal with Swedish telecoms firm Ericsson <LMEb.ST> to jointly develop a technology that makes cell phones more versatile. Qualcomm is now working to develop technology for wireless communication through airlinks to antennas that let electronic devices like phones, computers and printers communicate with each other and the Internet. The next generation of chips that combine voice and data will displace the company's existing CDMA business by the end of next year, followed about six months later by HDR, or high data rate, chips, which roughly double voice capacity and support data rates of over 300 kilobits per second, Jacobs said. This technology will allow high-speed Internet access to the estimated half of U.S. homes that cannot receive DSL or cable modem access. It will also be priced competitively with those services, the CEO said. "We now ship chips with eight voice channels per chip. The HDR has 32 channels per chip," he added. This will open up a broad new range of capabilities for wireless equipment, which will likely replace existing devices such as laptop computers and Walkman stereos, Jacobs said. "You will be able to walk in to an office or an airport and hook up to a monitor for display, then leave the bigger peripherals behind for the next person to use," he explained. ((-- Los Angeles bureau + 1 213 380 2014)) REUTERS *** end of story *