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

To: Dennis Roth who wrote (7837)	3/22/2000 3:40:00 PM
From: gdichaz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

Dennis: Thanks. This goes to the nub of the fears of the operators - who must be among the most fearful people on earth - that by doing something, by taking action, they might - just might possibly or maybe - pick wrong. For those of you who may not have followed the Q as an innovative company, there are two Dr's who founded the Q, Dr J and Dr V. Both are wiz's (to put it mildly) Dr V wrote the book - literally - on data (inter alia) - and the reason HDR exists is that this is his "baby". He determined that it is much more efficient and cost effective to send wireless data on a separate "channel" from voice. He could explain this in theory, but the great thing is that the Q is making his "vision" available in the real world. Who among us is to second guess these two? I will not. Onward and upward for HDR. (Forgive me Ramsey) HDR is actually as much a "no brainer" as 1XRTT in my opinion. But perhaps that recognition takes a bit of time. Best. Chaz

To: Dennis Roth who wrote (7837)	3/22/2000 4:03:00 PM
From: LBstocks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13582

Tech-mad US lags in wireless, but boom in sight March 22, 2000 12:34 By Ian Simpson NEW YORK (Reuters) - Robert Silvestri huddled over his wireless phone to chat in a bitter Manhattan wind, then straightened and proclaimed his love for the slim black device. Praising the phone's use-anywhere convenience, Silvestri, a 25-year-old tobacco company salesman from Fairlawn, N.J., said, "I always carry it. I feel naked without it. I need it." More and more Americans feel the same way. They have swarmed to get wireless phones so fast that the United States is now the biggest market in the world, with more than 86 million subscribers and $45 billion in annual revenues. But even with its long love affair with other cutting-edge technologies like the Internet, the United States is far behind the rest of the developed world in the percentage of people yakking on the lightweight phones. In such European countries as Finland, where the versatile gadgets can be dialed to buy sodas from a vending machine or pay for a car wash, more than 60 percent of the population has them, the highest level of market penetration in the world. By comparison, about 32 percent of Americans have wireless phones, a few percentage points behind New Zealand and France. Less than 1 percent of U.S. wireless traffic is for data, like sending messages or tapping into the Internet, compared with 10 to 15 percent in Europe. "You'd be hard pressed to find any other technology ... where we lag the world the way we lag the world in this category," said Andy Sakuwaty, president of Sprint PCS Group , the No. 3 U.S. wireless carrier. A PHONE IN EVERY POCKET But even with the laggard status, industry watchers and executives were unanimous in saying the United States was poised to put a phone in just about everybody's pocket in the next few years. "We have a lot of growth yet to go," said Michael Rollins, an analyst with Salomon Smith Barney. The United States trails other countries for several reasons that range from how charges are billed to conflicting technological standards to fragmented markets. For example, the United States mostly uses a billing system where the person being called pays, as opposed to the caller-pays system in Europe. The system meant that Americans tended to keep their phones off when not in use. That wrinkle has smoothed out in recent years as Americans switched more to plans where they buy monthly batches of wireless minutes. Rollins said the new arrangements created a "superman complex ... where subscribers feel invincible and use more than their allotted number of minutes." The United States also used an alphabet soup of different calling protocols, such as the Global Standard for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard, the Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) technology and the now-dominant higher-capacity Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) protocol. The varying standards used by different regional carriers made it tough for customers to have a phone that could be used throughout the United States. By contrast, Europeans have been using only the GSM protocol for years. CRAZY QUILT The United States also had a crazy quilt of regional jurisdictions, meaning that phone companies had to get approval from hundreds of agencies to set up systems. But big carriers have largely knit those areas into seamless regional or even national systems, like those set up by Sprint PCS and AT&T Corp. . With those and other hurdles cleared, industry watchers said U.S. wireless phone use was poised to explode in the next few years. Andrew Cole, head of wireless strategy at Renaissance Strategy Inc., a Boston consultancy, said the U.S. wireless market could hit 80 percent penetration in five years. The cost of a U.S. wireless phone call has fallen by more than half in the last three years, to an average of about 30 cents a minute. The catalyst is increasing competition, with most U.S. subscribers able to pick their service from among half a dozen carriers. Use also will pick up from the surging use of phones to transmit such data as messages and news and to connect to the Internet. Wireless carriers "will make gazillions of dollars" from developing their own online services, such as electronic commerce, and peddling them to customers, Cole said. "We haven't seen the beginning of what they will be able to do," he added.