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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (7673)	7/18/2000 1:26:25 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 12823

OT: Oh oh, Emporer's clothes alert!! Hi Frank, Re: (Going off topic for a moment, Sprint PCS is now notorious for oversubscribing its PCS service, i.e., undersizing their ability to complete incoming calls due to too few outgoing air links. I'm finding that many of my calls -- I've done this under controlled conditions when I've suspected that it was happening -- are now going directly to voicemail instead of being cut through to my handset. This happened last year too, but was better for a spell. But I'm finding that it's happening again. Another variation of bandwidth chicken, as the carrier tests the limits of user tolerances. Now, if we're having these problems today with "voice" channels rated at 13 kb/s, what are we to find when we go to "multimedia" channels rated at 2 Mb/s?) Oh oh, Emporer's clothes alert!! I'm sorry, really, I am sorry but I object violently to this statement of yours. First of all, you wicked observer, you hide the underbelly of the entire industry under the rubric of 'going off topic'??? Dude, this is the only topic in William Esrey and Mike Armstrong's offices that has any resonance there. The rest of the blather about 3G, 4G, forgery, is mere postulating and posing by the press release production personnel. I have to commend Walt Mossberger of the WSJ for at least attempting to clue the breathless investor in to the reality of 3G. This $#!+'s expensive. No mere mortal can handle the per minute charges. Oh oh, now I stepped in it, just as the press is set to drive WAP into the floor for insipid performance, I'm suggesting that no one in their right mind will pay the Mb rate for 3G. Oh well, caught between a wooky and a swippery swope. At least under my scope. Tou Loose, Le Faineant

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (7673)	7/18/2000 1:38:38 AM
From: Jeff Hayden	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

I have the AT&T Mitsubishi T250 phone that uses WAP over CDPD. I have to put in two bits for why WAP isn't the greatest - but it is somewhat useful. The speed of the connection isn't all that bad. What is bad is the dinky screen and the almost useless keypad as a keyboard. WAP reduces everything to many levels of choice menus where you can keep pressing number keys to walk down the menus. Each menu can only support 2 or 3 words before the line runs off-screen. To read the rest of the line, you step to it and it will begin scrolling sideways. You click a software programmable key, usually programmed to mean OK, to go to a deeper menu or the final end page - which may be a news item or the weather in a city you've chosen. The speed is just fine for a device that has no screen on which to display detailed things. If WAP includes pictures - this phone doesn't implement that. Now, do I like it? Well, yes, so far. It is very slick for getting a preview of my e-mail. I can read the text messages just fine - of course I can't download the attachments. I also use it to check the market indices and my stocks as well as some news and weather items. Another nice thing - You pay a fixed fee each month for the PocketNet service and you can use as many minutes as you want - it's not charged to your monthly minute allotment. A bad thing - You can get a laptop connection for the phone but AT&T charges $0.05 per kilobyte. So, if you move 1MB it costs $50 - yikes!! The plan I'm on is Digital One Rate with the full-up PocketNet services. I will drop the full-up part and back off to just getting e-mail and the news and weather items. The full-up includes the PIM stuff - contact manager, schedule, to do. This stuff is useless when the net doesn't come up - so you're much better off with a Palm or equivalent. In fact the Palm with wireless modem may be a better way to go all around - at least it has a bigger screen and it's easier to input on. I agree with you're thinking that WAP probably won't last. It may be the only realistic way for my phone to work on the web. I feel the phones will become much more capable. Maybe Palm ought to come out with a wireless PIM that just happens to include a phone? As an aside, I do like AT&T's Digital One Rate. It is expensive, but it really does work almost everywhere, including on the old analog systems. The One Rate allows unlimited roaming over any system without extra charges. On quite a few occasions now, my friend with a Sprint phone has had to use mine because his didn't work in certain areas. AT&T's TDMA ain't really all that bad. Jeff