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Technology Stocks : The New Qualcomm - a S&P500 company -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dooker who wrote (7099)	2/29/2000 1:31:00 PM
From: Mika Kukkanen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13582

Engineer is right. Actually Lucent announced some time back basically WDM technology over the air, i.e, infra-red or more accurately near infra-red that is split into various wavelengths (or colours - just like (D)WDM). These of course need no spectrum rights, just LoS...and then I wouldn't call the reciever an antenna either. This is nothing new, as i mentioned before Lucent announced a product some 7 or 8 months back. Gilder's post looks very much like what I have described above. However, the company he may be talking about has a similar system and they are negotiating possibly with Motorola. Those who know me know I have not a great deal of respect for Gilder. Oh well, we'll see.....

To: Dooker who wrote (7099)	2/29/2000 3:58:00 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

Please read the following from San Diego Union Trib earlier in year. Could this be the type of thing Gilder referred to in his post? What will be the next "big new thing" in San Diego? [snip] AirFiber Executives at AirFiber in Rancho Bernardo declined to discuss their company, explaining they want to avoid publicity until they're ready to lift the curtain on their technology later this year. Their reluctance is understandable. Some people familiar with AirFiber describe the company's advanced communications systems as "a paradigm shift." Founded in May 1998, AirFiber has developed laser-based technology to provide high-bandwidth, low-cost communication links for the last mile of telephone service -- long considered the Internet's biggest bottleneck. "This is going to be a really big deal. It's a revolutionary approach," says Bill Stensrud, a venture capital investor who sits on AirFiber's board of directors. Stensrud's firm, Enterprise Partners in San Diego, has invested about $6 million in AirFiber through two rounds of financing. About half of that came in the third quarter of 1999, when Air Fiber raised $37.5 million in a second-round financing deal that included Foundation Capital, Qualcomm, Northern Telecom and other major corporations, in addition to Enterprise Partners. Using an optical transceiver that consists of a laser transmitter and a signal detector, AirFiber says its equipment allows local telephone customers to attain data rates as high as 2.5 billion bits (2.5 gigabits) per second, which is comparable to speeds on many long-distance fiber optic lines. In contrast, the fastest data rate to be squeezed out of a conventional twisted pair copper wire telephone line is 56,000 bits (56 kilobits) per second. Higher data rates, in the range of 5 to 6 million bits (5-6 megabits) per second, are available through so-called DSL service (Digital Subscriber Line), although AirFiber still promises a bigger, faster pipeline. The wireless nature of what AirFiber calls its free space optics enables the company to install its equipment atop buildings quickly and without costly trenching required for fiber optic cabling. AirFiber also has told its investors that its laser technology requires no spectrum license and avoids permits usually required to deploy fiber optic lines. What's less clear, however, is how AirFiber's laser-based technology will contend with the optical interference of fog and, especially, rain. AirFiber's chief executive, Jim Dunn, was a co-founder and senior executive of Primary Access in San Diego, a firm led by Stensrud that developed integrated systems for dial-up access to the Internet. Primary Access also was the first company to introduce modems capable of downloading software. Dunn had studied at the University of California San Diego under Irwin Jacobs. He later worked for Jacobs as a software engineer at Linkabit, the legendary wireless start-up. [snip] ¸ Copyright 1999 Union-Tribune Publishing Co