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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pyslent who wrote (129228)	5/23/2003 3:03:45 PM
From: verdad	Respond to of 152472

"I always thought it was a bad sign that ricohet had such pathetic take up." INDEED! It shows the price elasticity of demand for connection to the Internet (which, last I checked is still mostly accessed by dial-up subscribers at ~$9.95 per month). The idea that in order to be competitive, a wireless service provider must not only provide voice, but unlimited data access, is not all that far-fetched. Wireless carriers or competing technologies likely slammed the door on Cricket (through various indirect, competitive means) so as to prevent having to immediately pay for rolling out more infrastructure upgrades (EV-DO, DV). The alarming thing is that the total size of the pie has not increased, but competition has (exponentially). Irwin, et al, opined that competitors would jump into the marketplace, however, the rate of adoption and overall industry growth expectations seemed to have been vastly different (for QCOM's wireless data solution). He also was afraid industry would opt for W-CDMA or some other standard that would take a while to develop. Well, now we're looking at WiFi, OFDM, etc. for data. CDMA remains the best voice solution. I'm still puzzled why QCOM (with all that FAT cash) doesn't pony up the money to help Verizon, Sprint deploy 'just the additional channel cards' and 'shelves' required for EV-DV. Guess the infra upgrades would be significant, there are spectrum issues, or there is already too much debt and accts receivables between QCOM and domestic carriers. Or, worse yet, as you're suggesting, the DEMAND IS SOFT for WIRELESS DATA at the prices necessary to cover deploying QCOM's soln in the domestic U.S.. And technology equity prices are going to recover when???