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

To: MikeM54321 who wrote (10759)	3/22/2001 2:31:19 PM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 12823

SMS is very practical. During roll out I had two GSM phones wth two different numbers connected to the power socket all time. So that during a roll out meeting and would fire SMS messages to subcontractors and to the guy shipping equipment and they would be following the instructions on the go. I switched off both and hten in the morning I would read all of them at breakfast and reply or forward them. In this case it was very practical because we all know what we were talking about. So the short messages was that prompting people to take action. No philosophical discussion. Oh, a couple of my female friends and me also agreed not to exchange SMS on weekends. Boyfriends are jealous. I haven't used GPRS yet.

To: MikeM54321 who wrote (10759)	3/22/2001 3:23:40 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 12823

Do you really think this is going to be anywhere near accurate? Plus the big thing to think about is, "spectrum pricing." Obviously, this is going to depend on the carrier. In certain markets, spectrum is extremely valuable....notice that Verizon spent $5B on New York spectrum alone during the last auction (the entire auction only raised $17B). Personally, I'm not sure why they spent this much on just one market. yahoofin.cnet.com OTOH...PCS dropped out of the auction completely (stated they had enough spectrum for their needs) and Leap Wireless managed to win spectrum at a price of $15/pop. JMO....but I think that, in most markets, there is enough spectrum to handle both voice and data. The US has such a low population density that vast areas of the country likely have more spectrum than they could ever use for voice services. Just today, I was surprised to see an add for PrimeCo (Chicago) which allowed all you can eat wireless plans ($50 w/o long-distance, $75 w/long distance). Part of the attractiveness of 1xrtt is that it will double voice capacity (when you use new handsets)....this should help lessen any spectrum burden. In terms of equipment, the numbers seem reasonably accurate since the upgrades are not particuarly large. They dont have to build new cell sites or install new back-end equipment. One big difference between US CDMA carriers and European GSM carries is that the upgrades will be in existing spectrum. Nothing seems to work over here. I'm not savvy enough to figure it out, but I read the reviews and narrowband wireless stinks. Maybe it's because we have the alphabet soup of standards? Thought I would throw some stats in here (from memory)....PCS and Nextel claim 1m wireless data subs apiece (out of about 10m customers each). Verizon and AWE are around 750,000. The problem, as always, is that I dont know how they define "wireless data sub". The 1m data subs for PCS supposedly generated $25m last quarter in charges. Not great...but not terrible either. I think at least part of the problem is the fact that are handsets suck. The Japanese i-mode users have 8-line color displays rather than our 4 line monochrome. As always....appreciate the debate. Debating people who agree with you tends to be a useless exercise....I think I can always find someone to disagree with me on the LMT thread ;-). Slacker