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To: foundation who wrote (9379)	2/22/2001 1:51:26 PM
From: foundation	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 34857

Alcatel admits delayed 3G and GPRS launches By Catherine Bremer, Reuters 22 February 2001 French telecoms equipment maker Alcatel said on Thursday it did not expect third-generation UMTS mobile phones to hit the market before 2004, pushing back its earlier forecast by a year. Alcatel, which this week launched its first GPRS (general packet radio service) mobile phone to speed up online services on GSM networks and plug the gap before UMTS, blamed the delay on the time and investment needed to develop the technology. "The roll out of 3G will take three to five years from now, whereas last October we were saying two to three years. We're looking at end-2003, early 2004," Michel Rahier, head of Alcatel's mobile unit, said at a news conference at the GSM World Congress in Cannes. "UMTS terminals will take over in 2007, not 2005. The pace is going to be a bit slower than we thought a few months ago, which means the GPRS lifecycle will be longer. The availability of terminals and services are key and this takes time," he said. After sluggish WAP phones failed to grab consumers last year, industry watchers are worried that a delay in high-speed mobile services could further dent the battered telecoms sector, which is laden with debt and fending off questions about when mammoth 3G investments will pay off. Adding fuel to their jitters about when revenues will start flowing from high-speed services, Alcatel's GRPS phone is, at 14.4 Kbits/sec, only slightly more powerful than today's WAP phones. Early GPRS may fall short of expectations The phone, due to be in the shops around May, offers "always on" Web access, which should banish the frustrating connection delays that have hit sales of WAP phones and enable users to pay by kilobyte of data rather than per minute. But the handsets only have a quarter of the capacity needed to offer fully-fledged Internet and video services, and upgraded versions running on four data channels are unlikely to reach the necessary speeds before year-end. The only other GPRS handsets on the market, recently launched by Motorola also offer around twice the 9.6 Kbit/sec capacity of today's WAP phones. Alcatel, which will supply its GPRS technology to Portuguese mobile operator TMN, said it was hopeful of reaching a deal to supply Orange before the end of the first half. The company has also been shortlisted by Orange parent France Telecom to supply UMTS solutions, along with handset makers Nokia and Ericsson. "I don't believe the GPRS market will explode until 2002. There are lot of big technological questions today, and our clients cannot demonstrate that these phones will work really well," said Jacques Combet, Alcatel business systems director said. "The technology is not yet bringing what people expected, and operators want to avoid the disappointment they saw with WAP," Combet told Reuters. Rahier said the delay meant Alcatel - which signed a deal this week to supply Vivendi's SFR cellphone group with a UMTS network - expected other UMTS deals could be three to six months away. totaltele.com

To: foundation who wrote (9379)	2/22/2001 2:02:36 PM
From: Eric L	Respond to of 34857

re: Technology mix for Y2000 (unofficial from EMC) Tech Subs end 2000 % GSM 440 million 62,4% CDMA 81 million 11.5% TDMA 64 million 9.1% PDC 50 million 7.1% AMPS 70 million 9.9% Total 705 million 100% Year 2000 Growth by Technology TDMA: 35.1 to 64 million subs = + 82.3% YTD Growth (28.9 million new subs) GSM: 271 to 440 million subs = + 62.3% YTD Growth (169 million new subs) CDMA: 50 to 81 million subs = + 62.0% YTD Growth (31 million subs) >> Good Times Keep On Rolling GSM Newsreel Feb 22, 2001 Considering the location, the news from EMC that GSM continues to be the big man on campus can only be welcome. According to EMC's World Cellular Review 2000-2005 which is available this month, GSM had 440 million subscribers at the end of 2000, comfortably placing it in pole position. CDMA had 81 million, TDMA, 64 million and PDC, 50 million. There are still almost 70 million analogue hold-outs which given the ubiquitous coverage of GSM, probably means they still have black and white televisions. In terms of regional numbers Europe and Asia and Pacific are getting closer together with 289 and 219 million respectively. US/Canada have 109 million and the rest if the Americas, 62 million. The Middle East has 10 million and Africa, 16 million. Despite the apparent market domination of prepaid, it still only represents 36 per cent of the global market and GSM has 80 percent of that market. The not so good news from EMC is confirmation of the continued of the continues decline in ARPU. At the end of the 2000, EMC says world average ARPU was $39.31, down from nearly $60 in December 1997. Also falling is the world average airtime costs with peak minutes now costing just over 30 cents. The top market in terms of penetration is Iceland as expected, but the surprise is Austria which just edges out longtime leader Finland. Taiwan is fourth, followed by Hong Kong Italy and Israel. The top market in terms of total numbers continues to be the US with close to 100 million, but Chain is catching up fast and tops the list of net subscriber add during 2000. China Mobile is the leading operator in terms of domestic subscriber numbers. Top new operator in 2000, measured by average monthly growth rate, is Blu of Italy. With the attention of visitors to 3GSM being firmly focused on content and applications, perhaps the most interesting data from the EMC report concerns the world's top 15 mobile internet operators. Predictably, the runaway leader is NTT DoCOMo with over 12 million subscribers to I-mode. The other operators in the top five are KDDI, J-Phone, LG Telecom and Sprint PCS. As keen-eyed readers will have noted, none of these are GSM operators- hopefully this situation will change as GPRS and 3G come fully on stream. << - Eric -

To: foundation who wrote (9379)	2/22/2001 2:28:58 PM
From: 49thMIMOMander	Respond to of 34857

GPRS is truly difficult to understand.. Especially when it gets into how long it takes to reboot a buggy packet network, what that has to do with GPRS is really difficult to understand. (the best thing with WinMe is that it reboots slightly faster then win98) Also interesting that "GPRS speeds often fail to exceed those of 2G networks"??? Now, which speed is what speed and who network and how many fingers in which class?? But it surely sounds interesting, someone skilled selected the best possible combination of emotional propaganda words. Ilmarinen. P.S. Some test results on re-sent, lost packets, delays and response times would be more interesting although it is fun to reboot a network, maybe just because of one motorola phone going mentally packet handicapped. (in Japan the phones are at least rumoured to reboot to sanity more or less automatically)