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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ftth who wrote (6906)	5/3/2000 11:45:00 PM
From: axial	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

Hi, Dave - Your post about the @home crowd's self-righteous complaints reminds me of the lawyers' joke: after murdering his parents, the accused young man pleads with the judge for considerate treatment, because he is, after all, an orphan. Your suggestion about a possible direction for discussion is appreciated; the contributions of Professor Levy, wireless wonk, transmission, yourself (and more) will be needed. For instance, I'm at a complete loss, right now, for a means to quantify migration/buildout costs; these are fundamental to the arguments. European leadership in GSM (Japanese, too) has to be discussed, as well as how much this leadership will bleed into American (and Chinese) thinking. How willing will South America, predominantly TDMA, be to embrace CDMA?

To: ftth who wrote (6906)	5/4/2000 11:16:00 PM
From: Geof Hollingsworth	Respond to of 12823

It might be instructive to start by outlining the current and near-term-future state of the european (esp. Scandanavian) markets in that regard Hi Dave, You are right, the Nordic countries are the early adopters of mobile data (essentially SMS at this point). The reasons, IMO, are that they also have the greatest penetration of fixed-line Internet, and for mobile data to take off you need both the wireless infrastructure and a critical mass of internet subscribers (Metcalf's law at work). Average monthly SMS usage in the Nordic countries is in excess of 25/subscriber. It is apparently being used primarily for person-to-person chatting (sort of a mobile ICQ). A "mobile buddy list" is scheduled for introduction which will tell you when your buddies switch on their phones and when you switch on yours will tell you which of your buddies are already switched on. In addition to chat, directory services is an obvious application, especially if the look-up supports voice recognition. The next big thing will be WAP and GPRS, but not as soon as people think (or thought). The WAP 1.1 has interoperability problems, and there aren't many interesting portals or services available so no-one is pushing the WAP handsets. GPRS is now scheduled to be trialed in the second half of the year. I think of GPRS as the wireless equivalent of xDSL-a higher bandwidth always-on connection. Download speeds will be 40+kbps, with 14.4 upload speeds. I think GPRS will give a big boost to WAP, and conversely, its hype probably means that people are holding off until it is available. Assuming GPRS rollout next year, some analysts predict that by 2002 all handsets sold in Europe will be WAP-enabled, and as a result that by the end of 2003, there will be more than 200 million WAP hadsets in use. Some feel the major uses will be practical things like unified messaging travel bookings, and other commerce-type applications. Others (like me) think that chatting and MP3 downloads are going to be bigger and sooner. All in all, it still seems early, but I suspect we won't have too much longer to wait.