Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Ruffian who wrote (9955)	5/11/2000 3:01:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 13582

<rant on> There's a saying [in London] that fashions start in the West and end in the East. AT&T seem a sorry case. TDMA is a basket case, despite impressive growth last year [albeit a lot less than CDMA's]. Telecom New Zealand rejected an expansion of their TDMA network in favour of dumping it and going to CDMA, to be installed by Lucent. TDMA is one of those things which was great in its day and although still rapidly growing, is already obsolescent, but cheap and useful so is still adopted. People buying a TDMA handset are NOT thinking 3 years ahead and committing to a long-term high-value product. Cellphones are increasingly a fashion item and a one-year purchase. All it will ever do is voice. The cunning ploy of extracting a few $$billion from AWE shareholders was a good way to fund some CDMA development. They'll milk TDMA as long as they can and then it will be left to rot on the vine until they uproot it when enough customers abandon it. Their transition to CDMA will be the tricky part and by the end of next year they will have announced how on earth they are going to move to CDMA to respond to an explosion of WWeb demand. Similarly, NTT is a sorry, lumbering dinosaur, mired in the bitumen pit of their "Japan Only" PHS or PDC system and hopelessly trying to make W-CDMA the international standard. They don't have a hope. They are a legacy monopoly relic of the 20th century government phone systems. They still make a fortune and will do so for quite a few years, but the glory days are gone and will more quickly dwindle as the $36bn 3G auctions roll like thunder around the world. From the UK to Australia, it is dawning on governments just what the hell is going on! Jaws will be dropped. Panic will set in at phone companies as a veritable frenzy of rollouts rampage across the world to cash in on the WWeb and to justify the big spectrum payments and as the losers ponder their fate. Those 3G spectrum payments show just how big the telecom companies think WWeb will be, and they will be conservative on that! People thought NextWave bid too much in 1996 for 100m pops. Now they can see that $4.3bn was reasonable. NTT buying a piffling part of a Dutch phone company is NOT going to change the world and get W-CDMA adopted. W-CDMA is no better but comes with a lot of baggage and a yawning chasm between the dream and the reality. <rant off> So, let's hear it from DDI and cdma2000. It's Friday here and in Japan now. Mqurice