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Technology Stocks : Nokia (NOK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tero kuittinen who wrote (5500)	6/13/2000 2:58:00 PM
From: Eric L	Respond to of 34857

Tero, << Now we're really entering the Hicksville city limits >> Whoa, partner. I am in that "Hicksville" you describe when I travel 2 miles from my office or residence. When I first purchased dualmode digital in 1997 I was not even on BAM's digital coverage map (although I had digital coverage). Forget GSM here. I am real fringe VoiceStream, and beyond fringe there is nothing, so I turn on their "GSM" when I am several miles up the road, headed for the airport for a European departure. << These "four years into future" predictions will be a good source for office humor sometimes during the first administration of Mrs. Clinton >> In which case I may have to move my office to Helsinki. <g> << 50% share for GSM/TDMA in USA would not be totally shabby in 2004... even though it's an obvious blackballing move from Strategis. >> Nor would the 49% they project for CDMA compared to the 48% they project for GSM/TDMA. Big "HOLE" for Nokia at the moment, and a source of embarrassment (witness this weekends financial analyses) but I am sure that Nokia management will do something about that. Of course you are correct in noting that EMSR subscriber numbers were not included in the Strategis figures. Cahners In-Stat does not deal with them either. Both are dealing with 800 MHz "Cellular" (digital & analog) and 1900 MHz "PCS". Do you know if CTIA includes EMSR in its wireless subscriber numbers which totaled 86.1 million at year end 99? It is my impression that they do not. I think they ignore all forms of specialized mobile radio, which in total accounts for some 50 million US subscribers, I think. << Surely Nextel is going to have more than 15 million subs by 2004 >> In the US? Think I'll go out and buy some stock. I think Nextel's US subscriber base was about 4 million at year end. Where did you come up with that number? Possible I guess. Might depend on who owns them in 2004. << I'm not sure how defining these market shares without overlap is done, since GSM/TDMA dualmode phones will become the high-end norm within two years. I assume that in the case of SBC lets say, a PAC Bell customer will be counted as GSM, and an Ameritech customer will be counted as TDMA. Your right though, could get a bit murky. Then of course counting handset sales is slightly different than counting net subscriber adds. What is really going to get confusing is going to be the TDMA, EDGE, GSM, GPRS, AMPS thing, as it relates to what mode and band is combined. You might say, ignore AMPS, but remember our digital buildout began fully 5 years after Europes, and the 800 MHz AMPS foundation plays an important roll in providing the seamless voice coverage across the US that we have enjoyed for some number of years. We are several years away from completely overcoming this. I travel the US and the single detriment to AMPS service for me is the battery life issue, but I am seldom on AMPS long enough for that to be a major detriment, and I can live without wireless data while I am in "Hicksville", and in reality I can live without WAP altogether. In the meantime, I am Verizon digital using trimode, so do you count me as cellular or PCS? The answer is cellular, because I am in a zip where Verizon has no PCS license. This gets murky too when a carrier has both "cellular" and PCS licenses in the same geography. These distinctions are not going to go away in the Americas, for awhile, Cindy Lauper or no Cindy Lauper. One thing I will give you is that the US made a mess of carving up geography into MSA's, RSA's, MTA's, & BTA's, and slicing up spectrum within each for PCS. Merger & acquisition is kind of putting that back together in some semblance of natural order. Then there is prepaid .... but we will save a discussion of how prepaid subscribers are counted here v. Europe for another rainy day. << AT&T is going for the international roaming as fast as they can, since this gives them one definite edge over Sprint. >> How long do you think it will be before Chris Gent & Gerald Flynn will do something about international roaming? Same for Sprint? << a chunk of those Nextel phones on sale in 2004 will have GSM as a roaming mode >> As will "a chunk" of the CDMA phones. Another potential Nokia dilemma. The old GSM "Global Roaming advantage" is about to go by the boards, just as the data advantage was blown out of the water. TIA approved the CDMA SIM-RUIM specification several months ago. CDG is now a member of the GSM Global Roaming Forum. Vodafone Airtouch is hosting the June meeting of the Forum which starts tomorrow. Reports on GAIT, GSM/iDEN, & GSM/CDMA progress will be presented at noon. On the following day Global Roaming will be discussed at the CDMA World Congress in Hong Kong. The agenda there is as follows: >> Exploiting SIM technology for cdmaOne/cdma2000 * What new service and application opportunities are emerging? * Securing wireless transactions for e-commerce Roundtable Discussion: Handset evolution and the future of CDMA roaming * what are the challenges in evolving multi-mode, multi-band handsets to enable global roaming? * what are the opportunities in moving from 2G to 3G? << - Eric -