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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SBHX who wrote (42793)	5/18/2001 11:40:08 AM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

SbH, << ...CDMA in 1996 ...At the risk of being tarred and feathered by americans, >> No tar. No feathers. Friendly bunch here. << 1. I didn't see the actual need for cdma when the rest of the world already adopted GSM >> GSM had an inefficient air interface. ... and in 1996 the "rest of the world" had not yet adopted GSM. It had spread beyond Europe to be sure, starting in Australia, and then to China, but NONE in the Americas, little in EMEA. none in Japan, Korea, or Russia. Great big chunks of the world with no GSM. At the end of 1995 GSM claimed a whopping 14 million subscribers (CDMA had already launched in Hong Kong and was fully commercialized in Korea and US in 1996). Not quite the "rest of the world". AMPS was the dominant technology worldwide. The primary "need" for CDMA was spectral efficiency. More on that below. In addition, CDMA could be overlaid over 800 MHz AMPS allowing efficient network reuse, in the world's largest "cellular" market, which employed a well built out single analog standard nationwide. Another perceived need here was open competition amongst technologies ... which is a rather American characteristic, and of course the same need that GSM satisfied which was digital capabilities to support data services. The CDMA twist was the inclusion of an IP backbone (rather than GSM's planned ISDN interface). Somewhat more up to date than GSM, one would say, and ETSI spent 1995 to 1997 trying to figure out if GPRS should have an IP backbone or ISDN connectivity. << 2. I don't know why the americans assigned 1.9GHz for digital cell phones when the rest of the world was using 1.8GHz. Adopting 1.8GHz would have avoided a lot of reengineering and manufacturing rampup costs. >> I don't know why (yes I do - same reason US chose 1900 MHz) EU adopted 900MHz for GSM when 800MHz was the predominant frequency range used for "cellular" throughout the world, and pretty much the exclusive "cellular" band in all the Americas. Simply stated when US decided to auction spectrum for PCS in 1994, the 1800 MHz band was occupied ... still is. Canada and most of Latin America followed US, assigning PCS to 1900 MHz. Back to the spectral efficiency of CDMA. If Europe had used CDMA they would not have had to add spectrum in the 1800 MHz band for DCN-1800. Now here is the good news for GSM. When GSM (PCS-1900) launched in the US in November of 1995, Ericsson was ready with infrastructure and Ericsson & Motorola with handsets. Data services from day one including OTA provisioning and 2-way SMS. Obviously the reengineering was minimal and minimal start up problems were experienced. CDMA did data in the Americas for the first time 4 years later in august 1999, one year after Korea. WAP enabled from day one, with an IP backbone. But here is the best news. By commercializing CDMA then evolving it, the world can (and will) now evolve to CDMA, and realize its benefits. All this the result of competition amongst technologies. Those are my thoughts. Best, - Eric -