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

To: D.J.Smyth who wrote (9892)	5/10/2000 12:33:00 PM
From: Curbstone	Respond to of 13582

comparable, some of the best, similar Weasel words. ...the three most popular wireless technologies TDMA, CDMA and GSM all offer comparable quality in voice transmission and capacity. next paragraph This improved capacity for operators would be at the expense of consumers... Contradiction, does CDMA increase capacity or doesn't it? Weak arguments, specious research, defensive posture. IMO we've got them right where we want them. AM

To: D.J.Smyth who wrote (9892)	5/10/2000 12:34:00 PM
From: engineer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

And how much of this is AT&T trying to cover their tails just before teh AWE lawsuit when they find out that it was a thinly disguised ploy to take $10B from existing shareholders and funnel it to the bottom line of AT&T, thus leaving a worthless stock for AWE investors? It is funny how every time someone gets their back to the wall, they start this campaign. Do the AT&T marketing guys really think that this ploy will help them? In no way is TDMA even close to CDMA in any shape or form. Most of the US TDMA system relies on the fact that they have analog. Wihtout it, they would have been sued out of business long ago by not being able to support all the subscribers, poor quality, dropped calls, etc.. Quick...if TDMA is such a good deal, name the handset mfgs who STOPPED making TDMA handsets over the last 5 years? List is 5 times longer than the ones still making them. Now list the handset mfgs who make CDMA handsets. Did the list shrink ? Did you see any of them give up and just go back to analog phones, because the carrier will just buy their analog phones and they didn;t have to support the digital TDMA mode? All these CEOs are not that stupid to just drop such a good tehcnology. I sugest that this letter will go the way of other famous posts, such as "jacobs patter" in WSJ, ERICY "cdma won't work", Bill Frezza, etc.

To: D.J.Smyth who wrote (9892)	5/10/2000 1:44:00 PM
From: Ajay Aggarwal	Respond to of 13582

UWCC responds...What about these CDMA supporters: WCOM, FON, BEL, GTE, VOD, NT, LU, ERICY, MSFT, PALM, COMS, SNE, KYO, Samsung, NTT, TM, ... I'm getting tired of typing :-)

To: D.J.Smyth who wrote (9892)	5/16/2000 1:09:00 PM
From: Dennis Roth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

Naysayers Edge-y About AT&T's Future -- Is Wireless Group painting itself into a technological corner? techweb.com JONATHAN COLLINS May 15, 2000, Issue: 510 Section: NEWS ANALYSIS It was enough to make you want to trade in your tarot cards. When AT&T brought its wireless business to the stock market late last month, it picked up $10.6 billion, making AT&T Wireless Group's initial public offering (IPO) the largest in U.S. history. But while investors flocked to the AT&T Wireless Group tracking stock, a number of analysts warned that the spin-off's future was in doubt. The cause for concern was time-division multiple access (TDMA), the technology that AT&T has been using to build its digital nationwide network. However, most investors gazed into their crystal balls and apparently didn't see technology as a key indicator of the wireless group's prospects. What they probably saw was the carrier's marketing success in building up a base of 12.5 million wireless subscribers for voice services and its potential to do the same for wireless Internet services. It remains hazy whose vision is correct. But when it comes to predicting the future of AT&T Wireless, industry fortune-tellers are divided into two opposing camps: technology vs. marketing. Those in the technology camp warn that the company, saddled with an outdated TDMA-based network, won't be able to compete against its newer rivals using networks based on code-division multiple access (CDMA). Verizon Wireless Inc. (New York), which recently stole AT&T's crown as the largest wireless operator in the United States, has a CDMA network, as does Sprint PCS (Kansas City, Mo.). CDMA is argued to be three times more efficient in spectrum usage than TDMA. Since the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) limits how much spectrum any one company can hold in any market to 45 MHz, using that spectrum efficiently is essential. What's more, as carriers now look to develop high-bandwidth wireless data services, spectrum efficiency has become the key measure of an operator's future. The less efficiently an operator uses its wireless spectrum, the fewer calls it can support per cell site. This forces the operator to split its current sites into smaller subdivisions, thereby driving up its infrastructure costs. Although it has wrestled with the poor performance of its wireless network in busy markets-most notably New York-AT&T asserts that its TDMA network will have no problem handling new customers and high-bandwidth services once the company rolls out a new third-generation (3G) technology starting in 2002. This technology, dubbed Enhanced Data GSM Environment (Edge), will give data rates of up to 384 kbit/s and promises to increase the capacity of AT&T's wireless network as much as sevenfold. But critics fault AT&T for its plans to adopt Edge. Tech guru George Gilder recently attacked AT&T's TDMA network as well as the company's planned upgrades in an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal. "AT&T is turning into a low-tech wasteland. It needs to radically upgrade its technology," he wrote. Gilder maintained that AT&T should ditch TDMA and Edge and switch its network to the faster and more spectrum-efficient CDMA-2000, CDMA's 3G technology slated for rollout in 2002. Data service based on CDMA-2000 is expected to offer speeds of up to 2 Mbit/s. At a recent Universal Wireless Communications Consortium (Redmond, Wash.) conference espousing the virtues of Edge, AT&T chief technical officer David Nagel argued that although Edge may not be the fastest technology available, it is by far the most economically viable strategy for taking advantage of AT&T's existing infrastructure. "This is not an issue of which technology is better. TDMA-Edge crosses the quality boundary. It is enough better," said Nagel. AT&T and other Edge supporters, such as BellSouth Corp. and SBC Communications Inc., also maintain that Edge will eventually give their subscribers access to the global system for mobile communication (GSM) wireless networks across Europe and Asia without having to change phones. That is because roaming handset capabilities will exist between networks using Edge and those using general packet radio service (GPRS), a subset of the Edge standard that European GSM operators are beginning to roll out. But while some industry players debate the merits of AT&T's network technology and its upgrade path, others insist that the true determinant of a wireless operator's success during the next few years won't be technology but rather marketing and customer relationships. "To judge a wireless business primarily by its technology is no longer relevant. The customer doesn't care what technology they are using. It's about the retail engine and not the network. Customer management will rule the day," says Andrew Cole, senior executive in charge of the wireless practice at Renaissance Strategy (Waltham, Mass). In this respect, AT&T has already shown the ability to push new ideas into the wireless space. In May 1998, it launched Digital One Rate, a plan that established flat-rate pricing by offering large buckets of minutes to be used for both for local and long-distance calls. All of AT&T's competitors quickly copied the plan, completely changing the way wireless is packaged in the United States. Since then, the company has initiated a range of new pricing schemes, including prepaid and family discounts. It's too early to tell what AT&T Wireless' marketing strategy will be for Edge, but it seems clear that the company's future depends on its ability to effectively market new services that the technology will enable. If the company succeeds, it will have proved that "enough better," as Nagel predicted, is indeed good enough. teledotcom.com Copyright ÿ 2000 CMP Media Inc.