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

To: foundation who wrote (32793)	2/24/2003 9:28:44 PM
From: foundation	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 196812

Telstra expands CDMA2000 1x coverage to Brisbane and Canberra EMC - Close Telstra's Director of Next-Generation Services, Tim Buckley, addressing a telecommunications conference in Sydney on 10 February 2003, disclosed that Telstra had made a commitment to the government to cover 1.4 million square kilometres with its CDMA2000 1X network. Having launched its 1xRTT service in Sydney, Melbourne and parts of regional Victoria in December 2002 after trialing the service with some 29 business customers , Telstra was rapidly expanding the service to other major cities. Buckley said Brisbane and the nearby Gold Coast were now on-air and Canberra was scheduled for mid-February 2003. Telstra intended to launch the service to all consumers 'very soon' with content including games and all-round user services. Among current business users were: a Waterboard inspector using a Sierra wireless card by Kyocera; a local council officer using a Kyocera 2235 () and a project manager using a wireless PC card. Telstra believed that it would not be camera and video gimmicks that consumers needed in the long run, but real next-generation services, he said. The consumer launch of the service will depend on the availability of services and content - which corporates largely provide for themselves. Asked whether Telstra had a time-frame for a W-CDMA rollout, Buckley said that as the expenditure involved in a W-CDMA rollout was likely to be in the order of ten times the CDMA2000 1X upgrade cost of around AUD 120 million, Telstra was not rushing in too quickly. Telstra's network manager, Kevin Phillips, confirmed that the operator had spent AUD 70 million on the GPRS network and would be faced with a bill of over AUD 2 billion for W-CDMA/UMTS. According to Phillips, the data speeds obtainable with the 1xRTT network were nominally 153 kbps, but 120 kbps was more realistic in practice. He considered that data rates between 60 - 80 kbps would be more likely to be obtained in fringe areas. At the same conference, Nortel's Australian CEO Steve Wood, forecast that CDMA2000 would be dominant in Asia. He expected a massive investment shift to the system which offered a lower capital investment commitment for CDMA users and long-term evolution via EV-DO and DV without the need for a new build-out. Colour handsets were currently driving data usage and revenue in the 34 CDMA2000 networks currently launched worldwide. Woods estimated there were over 145 CDMA2000 1X devices using the 800MHz band on the market at present. He said that over half Nortel's Australian workforce used CDMA2000 1x handsets. He believed that critical success factors for wireless data growth in Australia were: time to market establishing the right pricing structures perhaps using bundling, and *tapping into business demand while making the business case more compelling for business customers.