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Technology Stocks : Nokia (NOK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnG who wrote (15112)	9/13/2001 4:26:14 PM
From: 49thMIMOMander	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

Quacking a year too late is not even the habit of regular ducks. But I must admit it sounds fun. And must salute those who try to quack without understanding a quack. However, I do not understand the need to copyright last year quacks, "Material is Copyright of EMC. All rights reserved." Ilmarinen Btw, what is the quack of copying this "View Next 10 Messages \| Previous \| Next" Quack??? from the forbidden city??

To: JohnG who wrote (15112)	9/14/2001 1:07:31 PM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 34857

Waiting on the Next Nokia First it was hyped, now it's been written off. Will 3G wireless ever arrive? Plus, a reason to rail against England's Iron Lady. FORTUNE.COM Wednesday, August 22, 2001 By Justin Fox A year and a half ago the broadband, third-generation, watch-movies-on-your-phone-all-day mobile Internet was just around the corner. Now it's years away; some folks say it will never happen. This may be the result of a breach of the time-space continuum. Or maybe it's just that in times of technology-driven investment euphoria people tend to forget about mundane questions of when some amazing new profit-making innovation will kick in (I was as guilty of this as anyone), while in gloomy times like these anything that can't deliver revenue next quarter isn't worth even talking about. Yesterday I paid a visit to some people up in the Hertfordshire countryside whom I thought might offer a more reasoned perspective. The place was the Cambridge Technology Centre of a firm called PA Consulting. The people were consultants with PA, which has been involved in the cellular phone business since the early, early days, and employees of a PA spinoff called Ubinetics that's one of the few companies on the planet actually selling working third-generation (a.k.a. 3G) wireless products. So when will 3G wireless nirvana arrive? Well, Colin Aitken of Ubinetics says it will be at least FIVE years before 3G is up and running and used by lots of people. And he's the head of marketing and business development, so if anything you'd expect him to err on the side of optimism. Which means it's gonna be a while. As for GPRS, the intermediate wireless data-transfer technology (known by the shorthand 2.5G), that wireless operators and mobile phone makers are hoping will start gaining speed in Europe and Asia later this year, a more likely arrival date is mid 2002 or early 2003, says David Prichard of PA. These are of course just forecasts, and forecasts are often wrong. But this isn't just some Jupiter or IDC or Dataquest talking: PA was there back in 1985, advising the company now known as Vodafone in its fateful decision to pick Ericsson over AT&T as the main supplier of its base stations and other infrastructure (AT&T had the better technology, says PA global technology chief John Buckley, but Ericsson was actually willing to listen to what Vodafone wanted). Since then the firm has delved so deeply into wireless that it can not only make guesses about how many mobile phones will be sold next year -- it can actually build you a phone. That's how Ubinetics came into being, out of a PA project to build 3G testing equipment. The company now has 300 employees and sells PC-sized "test mobiles" at $250,000 a pop to wireless infrastructure makers like Ericsson (In the future it hopes to sell zillions of much-smaller 3G modules to be built into PDAs and other devices). The "mobiles" have to be so big because 3G standards, cobbled together by about 250 different companies, are still being changed every couple months. So unlike actual mobile phones, which use chips built to perform specific tasks, the test mobiles keep all their smarts in software form, which means they need a much bigger circuit board. Those ever-changing 3G standards are one reason why it will be years before there's a 3G phone you can fit in your pocket. Another is that designers still have a way to go before they figure out how to make 3G phones that won't fry people's brains. But the engineers at PA and Ubinetics who are working on these problems appear confident that they'll solve them eventually. At least they're confident that somebody will. The question of who that somebody will be is an interesting one. The battle to build the world's 3G networks has been largely won by Ericsson and Nokia, says PA's Mark Paxman, with the imagined threat from Japan's electronics giants never really materializing (mainly because, in Japan, operator NTT DoCoMo is the only company that actually knows how to put together a wireless network; each of its suppliers only understands a piece of the equation). But as for who's going to make the big bucks in the coming wireless data revolution, who knows? Nokia and Ericsson generally haven't been getting paid up-front for the networks they're building, so their success isn't guaranteed. PA obviously thinks there's room for startups like Ubinetics, but the consensus from the gaggle of wireless experts I had lunch with was that the "next Nokia" will come from Taiwan or Korea or maybe even mainland China. That's not just because they can make phones cheaper there; it's also because, increasingly, that's where the engineering expertise is.