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To: Puck who wrote (7050)	9/2/2000 2:33:13 AM
From: tradeyourstocks	Respond to of 34857

<Sprint's decision, however, wound up fracturing the U.S. wireless industry hopelessly and has permanently retarded its development.> You can't be serious?

To: Puck who wrote (7050)	9/2/2000 11:34:47 AM
From: Eric L	Respond to of 34857

Puck, << Sprint's decision, however, wound up fracturing the U.S. wireless industry hopelessly and has permanently retarded its development >> I respectfully disagree, and I do so as a long time, high APRU user of wireless mobile telephony, who travels the states. Prior to WirelessCo's (Sprints) decision to build out in the 1900 MHz spectrum which they were still in the process of bidding on in A&B block, At&T had already made their technology choice for IS-136, PrimeCo for CDMA and (most of) the RBOCs for CDMA, and Entities that had chosen GSM (Omnipoint, WW, Bell South, PacBell) were doing fine in the bid process, so Sprint did not fracture anything, it was already fractured digital wise. Sprint could have easily gone GSM instead of CDMA since they did not have the rich and well built out AMPS heritage the established wireless carriers had to be concerned with. They did not however, and GSM is forever relegated to being bit player status in the States. Sprint's decision during A&B block, set the nail in the coffin, and the fiasco that was C block permanently hammered it home. Not much was lost. Nothing was "permanently retarded", or even minimally retarded. Americans roamed seamlessly on regional or national nets with an AMPS foundation, migrating carefully to digital, while the 1900MHZ digital only players like PacBell, Western Wireless and Sprint methodically built out, or like Omnipoint, sporadically built out, and eventually dual mode AMPS/GSM handsets arrived on our shores, although sorta like WAP, much later than the CDMA ones. While the buildouts continue as does the conversion of the analog to digital, we are pretty much ready for 2.5G voice and data services, we have pretty much seamless digital national roaming, and great bundled rate plans that rival Europe. In addition we are seeing M&A, reducing the number of local and regional carriers, and the establishment of five world class national networks, using 3 technologies. As a result of all this CDMA (with SMS) has been established as the Global radio interface that will make multimedia services a reality. In addition the UWCC is pioneering the development of another air interface (EDGE) for the 3GPP world. The US remains the largest cellular market in the world. It has a relatively large and spread out geography, compared to many highly penetrated countries, and our copper based landline infrastructures is the best in the world, which has mitigated the need for SMS based data services, or web services for that matter. The USA, with 100+ million subscribers (despite low penetration rates) is large enough to support 5 national networks, with 3 competing technologies, 2 of which will shortly be interoperable. No retardation. Fractures (not caused by Sprint) healing. We never missed a beat. Well, we did miss one. Global roaming. The GSM edge. Not an edge for long. There probably would have been larger fractures if WirelessCo had chosen GSM. - Eric -