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To: T L Comiskey who wrote (19838)5/23/2000 1:52:00 PM
From: Ponderosa  Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 35685
 
Also, FYI, this pile of AT&T "spin" was in the WSJ this morning:

Letters to the Editor
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).

Letters intended for publication in the print edition of the Journal can be e-mailed to: letter.editor@edit.wsj.com. All letters are subject to abridgment. For more reader responses, see Voices.

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.



To: T L Comiskey who wrote (19838)5/23/2000 2:32:00 PM
From: techguerrilla  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 35685
 
Tim, my take on China Unicom

The Chinese are going to continue to play games with QCOM regarding CDMA. The bottom is, though, that THEY WANT IT. They just want a good deal. Period. It's clear that China's awful phone structure needs complete revamping. Patience!

Something tells me that Jacobs' refusal to talk about China means serious negotiations are, in fact, occurring. Jacobs is smooth and understands the need to deliberately build Qualcomm's infrastructure.

If the House passes PNTR for China tomorrow, all tech stocks will benefit.

I see it this way: the Clinton-Jacobs HDR demo in North Carolina is a sign of Qualcomm's power and the understanding of that power by the highest levels of government.

1) PNTR (House, 5/23)
2) PNTR (Senate, 6/2)
3) Fed finishes business (6/28)
4) Silly summer selloff ends (7/4)
5) QCOM announces much better than expected earnings (late July)
6) Q rocks
7) Big Christmas cellphone orders get placed in August, September, October
8) QCOM announces whopping earnings (late October)
8) Q explodes!

Just porchin'
John



To: T L Comiskey who wrote (19838)5/23/2000 3:07:00 PM
From: Jim Willie CB  Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 35685
 
TA on QCOM: Elliott Wave shows itself again

from the late March high of 160, we fell hard
QCOM appears to have fallen in three identifiable stages

stage#1: after steadyeddy behavior at low 130's give/take, and a brief blowoff top toward 160, we had a sudden decline to low 120's, supported by the flat moving averages, with a bounce up to 150... this stage is preceded by a reluctance to hold highs

stage#2: a loud ugly fast steady relentless decline to 100, after a breakdown below moving averages near 140, followed by a bounce back to 120, and a return to 100, all happening under the moving averages, which lately have transformed into upside resistance

stage#3: a breakdown off the 100 support levels, after building a clear bear descending triangle with base at 100, then falling to 78 yesterday, bouncing sharply upward toward 90, now settling down in lower 80's... this stage is concluded by a reluctance to hold lows

usually EWave sees first and third legs about same size, with second leg bigger, more sudden, and more painful... we saw exactly that

unclear where support is... but if a symmetry argument could be produced, it might go like this

peaks were seen at 150-160
Feb-March levels were steady at 130-135
April-May support was firm at 98-100
bottoms symmetrically could be expected at 78-82 ???
we need to see clear unwillingness to be in 70's

it makes sense, we will see
from the desk of a jackass

good sign: financial stocks (i.e. big banks) are firm NOW !!!
this is understood to mean the Fed tightening cycle is near its end

hey Ruffian, nice call last week about seeing 70's soon
/ Jim Willie