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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Asterisk who wrote (18605)	1/30/2002 6:17:52 AM
From: John Biddle	Respond to of 196654

did the rep address the inherant security concerns that have been raised about 802.11? No, he did not. At the end of his presentation, when time had essentially run out, he was hurriedly trying to get across some of the excitement he felt for the service and its power going forward. The ability to roam from an 802.11b connection to a 1x connection was, I believe, thrown in as a "wow" item, intended to surprise and even shock the audience a little. Verizon isn't going into the wireless Ethernet business, but they apparently plan to leverage it with this roaming capability. My view, not that of the rep, is that Wireless Ethernet is going to be very big within companies, but that it will not become big as a general subscription service available at a small number of high volume places like airports, train and subway stations and of course coffee shops. The inability of being able to use it anywhere will mean that users will still need/want their cellular data connections. If they have to pay for cellular data, how much will they also shell out for better throughput when they're at certain locations? There's also the problem that, at least today, one has to have subscriptions with multiple Wi-Fi providers. It could happen, but I think that as people see how good 1x is, Wi-Fi will diminish in attractiveness as a general availability access method. With wireless Ethernet effectively limited then to businesses, those businesses that care about the security weaknesses will plug them, and those who don't, won't. I think you'll see another trend too, and that will be the tying of wireless devices to PBXs, so that you can use your cellular phone all the time and when you're within range it hands off to the PBX and you don't use up your cellular minutes, but as soon as you move out of range you get handed off to the 1x network. What carriers get from this is getting you used to using the cellular for everything, and they'll aim to get companies who now only allow a small portion of their staffs to use cellular to switch to the entire staff. As rates come down, usage and users need to go up to compensate. Before they use data they use voice.