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

To: w molloy who wrote (32957)	2/28/2003 3:23:43 PM
From: q1000	Respond to of 196644

No mention of GSM1x by Alan Harper, Vodafone Group Strategy Director, interviewed by Martyn Warwick from GSM TV in association with Telecom TV at Cannes. After reading the posted article, I was curious to see if any mention had been made of GSM1x as part of the WCDMA rollout path—along the lines of Slide 28 at the AM. I think GSM1x enthusiasts better look to Asia! Here are my notes on 3 questions Warwick asked. My notes are close to a transcript (except for the questions). Mr. Warwick’s quotes in his article are not direct quotes from the GSM TV piece that I heard; if it is based on that interview, he has radically reworded Harper’s statements and introduced possible errors (3G CapX of 26 billion pounds in the article—apparently a multi-year number—versus the 2 million a year that I heard). Mr. Harper has a different take on the ease of migration to WCDMA than we have heard so often from Dr. J and no mention is made of GSM1x! *Why is GSM the best way to migrate to 3G rather than something like CDMA?* GSM and GPRS is a good place to migrate from—and the best place to migrate from—because we can have a more seamless evolution to wideband CDMA and real 3G technology. That way we have backward compatibility in the devices that really allows us to build the 3G coverage and capacity in a much more meaningful way for customers. We haven’t got the discontinuity that we have with the other technologies in moving from second generation to some sort of third generation—so really continuity—ease/efficient migration—and, most importantly from the customer’s point of view, it’s seamless—and that’s really the key issue. *Vodafone’s been trialing systems in various parts of the world—what have you learned—good and bad?* We have found issues of handover between 3G and 2.5G and 2G—and that’s really where more work needs to be done through the first half of this year so that services can become commercial on the back of the 3G networks—really in the second half of this year—probably in the autumn is when we really expect commercial service introduction to be taking place. *What opportunity is 3G going to provide to Vodafone when it’s up and running?* Well, clearly it’s a huge investment. We’ve invested already in a very large way in the licenses. We’re investing something in the order of 2 billion pounds a year in network capital expenditures on 3G. So it’s a big bet for the future—but it’s really part of where we see this business evolving to over the next decade or more. We clearly developed the business off the back of the GSM networks up until now. But if you look out beyond 2005 or 2010, really 3G gives us an evolution path to complete the sort of growth that we’ve seen in the mobile industry already and can continue to make it such a vibrant and healthy industry.