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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kent Rattey who wrote (72181)	5/23/2000 9:21:00 AM
From: Ruffian	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 152472

AT&T's 'Debacle'? Look Again George Gilder and Ralph Vigilante's May 1 Manager's Journal, "AT&T's Wireless Debacle," purported to be a critique of AT&T's wireless technology from an industry pundit, but it ignored Mr. Gilder's personal, major financial interest in Qualcomm, the company that promotes the technology the authors prefer. In skewering TDMA, a wireless technology used by several hundred million mobile telephone customers world-wide, Mr. Gilder committed misstatements of fact, misunderstandings of technology, and made gratuitous, irrelevant and ultimately mean-spirited ad hominem references (both pro and con). Let's look at the more obvious distortions: The Time Division Multiple Access technology Mr. Gilder derides is the basis of mobile telephone and data services that, world-wide, support more than 300 million customers; subscribers to such services are increasing by 25% a year. Moribund? Hardly. The TDMA family of technologies, which includes the variant of TDMA known as GSM (Global System for Mobile), is the dominant technology by a factor of more than 5 to 1 in this explosively growing mobile communications market. AT&T's variant of TDMA dominates in North and South America; GSM dominates in Europe and much of the rest of the world. At current growth rates, there will be more than half a billion customers world-wide enjoying service based on time division technologies by 2004. This is 5 to 10 times greater than the likely global penetration of CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology. Despite years of development, promotion, and claimed advantages for superiority, the CDMA technology Mr. Gilder champions has not become the market leader, and is not even the second most popular technology world-wide. In fact, the High Data Rate technology Mr. Gilder favors is not even a pure CDMA technology. It uses time division multiplexing to achieve those predicted high speeds. So to focus on whether TDMA or CDMA is superior is pointless: the best of third-generation systems will use a combination of technical magic to wring the most out of available radio frequencies and deliver services that are better than the ones we have today. AT&T and many other wireless companies have strategies -- and a deep technical storehouse of techniques -- to do just that. Mr. Gilder's essay misses the fundamental point that soon, wireless services based on TDMA will inter-operate. TDMA and GSM vendors and service carriers have put immediate self interest aside and agreed to converge on a new technology called EDGE (Enhanced Data for GSM Evolution), which promises seamless operation of both voice and data systems over much of the globe. Customers will soon be able to have a single wireless handset or other mobile device that will work everywhere. And EDGE services will not depend on any new wireless spectrum so the costs for this new service can be kept very reasonable. In contrast to what Mr. Gilder would have you believe, the technology for EDGE is ready, the global standards for it have been worked out, and orders for EDGE equipment have been placed with wireless vendors. EDGE-based services will begin to roll out in markets next year, a year earlier than Mr. Gilder states. As a result, those half billion TDMA customers will enjoy seamless services globally by the middle of this decade. EDGE customers will enjoy spectacular, always-on 384 kilobit per second data services that approach the performance levels associated today with fixed broadband technologies like cable, DSL and our own fixed wireless service. Of the major, international, mobile equipment vendors, Qualcomm is alone in not supporting EDGE and the global convergence that is beginning to happen in wireless. Qualcomm is set to miss out on the EDGE opportunity in the same way they missed the second generation TDMA technology known as GSM. As a result, CDMA customers may have to make do with a patchwork of incompatible services globally. If you follow Mr. Gilder's view to its logical conclusion, the U.S. would not become the leader of wireless technology world-wide but an information island, using over-engineered and overly expensive technology, based on standards unique to the U.S. Thus, the U.S. CDMA industry -- and Qualcomm -- are swimming against the tide of recent history. If nothing else, the Internet phenomenon has demonstrated the necessity of having a single world-wide standard for new communication services. But CDMA is not converging on a single world-wide standard. There are several incompatible CDMA standards, including one for the U.S. and one for Europe and the rest of the world. AT&T's stated plan, one which most familiar with the wireless industry know, is to use the globally supported CDMA where and when it makes technical and economic sense to do so. We have even designed our third generation wireless networks to support global CDMA technology where governments have made new wireless spectrum available. The CDMA standard we have chosen not to support is a U.S.-only variant called CDMA2000. In the last analysis, arcane technology choices hardly matter to customers who care about a superior service with the widest possible distribution at the lowest cost. George Gilder admonishes us to "listen to the technology" to find out what it is telling us. Unfortunately, when he listens, George sometimes hears voices that are not there. David Nagel Chief Technology Officer AT&T Menlo Park, Calif.