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

To: Eric L who wrote (53177)	11/23/2002 11:48:40 AM
From: Jim Mullens	Respond to of 54805

Eric, thanks for sharing the informative articles and your informative thoughts as well. The following were the first to catch my attention. Your thoughts- 1...>>>” For all practical purposes (and I'm excluding Nokia/TI at this stage) in the CDMA world you have one chipset supplier, and they have an awful lot on their plate at the moment.” <<< I agree, Qualcomm “has an awful lot on its plate”, and it appears to me that they are doing a pretty good job at delivering the “goods”. (never fast enough for you and me both, though). I continue to be impressed at their progress and at their decision to add to their R&D staff over the last 3 years (R&D % of Revenue: 2000- 11.1%, 2001- 15.3%, 2002- 14.9% ). Qualcomm’s R&D in 2002 amounted to $452 million, or $.56/share. Over the telecom depression, Qualcomm could have padded its earnings by reducing its engineering staff, but I believe they made the right decision accelerate product development at the expense of higher profits. 2. >>>”We are, however, at a relatively early stage of extending WLAN to hotspots in conjunction with Mobile WAN, but in terms of bowling pins we already have US mobile carriers T-Mobile offering WLAN at Starbucks, Borders, and some airports and hotels, AWS offering WLAN in 54 locations at Denver International with other airports coming on line soon, Sprint PCS announcing their intention to do the same thing, and Verizon (not Verizon wireless) already engaged. <<< WLAN (WiFi) deployment does appear to be in the early stages and from the articles the GSM community does appear to be entering the market sooner than their CDMA counterparts. This is probably more of a necessity for the GSM folks as their data offerings through GPRS appear to be at a significant disadvantage to those being offered by the CDMA 1X carriers and will be even more so when EV-DO takes hold. WCDMA still appears to be at least a year or two away. From the articles- 1. >>>”Blasi (AT&T) says the carrier is refining its strategy, including pricing, additional locations and the possibility of integrating Wi-Fi with its GSM/GPRS network. <<< 2. >>>”GoPort currently is priced at $9.99 per 24-hour period, with billing handled by QPass. Reiter says that sounds affordable, but that few business users will use Wi-Fi at an airport for more than an hour or so while they wait for a plane. He says carriers would encourage use by offering a lower rate covering a shorter period of time. <<< 3. >>>”T-Mobile's pricing includes a $2.99 option for 15 minutes of use. “<<< It appears, at least at this early state, that WiFi pricing is quite steep, especially if one could connect thru his cell phone at these same locations (especially more so in PCS's case at $10/ month) with the CDMA carriers monthly data rates. I believe this gives the edge to the carriers, especially the CDMA carriers. 4.>>>>”Assuming AT&T Wireless goes ahead with integrating its new GSM/GPRS network with Wi-Fi, subscribers could use Microsoft's platform to set up a data call using whichever network is available. <<< From the above it sure appears that the carriers are intending to offer data connectivity via both “networks”, thus indicating the complimentary nature of the two services. Thanks again for your informative post- Jim