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To: Ramsey Su who wrote (7693)	1/28/1998 2:28:00 PM
From: kech	Respond to of 152472

Ramsey - Sometimes they say a market climbs a wall of worry. Certainly enough out there to climb. Take standards for example: Headline: European Firms Fail To Agree On Next-Generation Cellular Format ====================================================================== STOCKHOLM -(Dow Jones)- Europe's biggest telecommunications-equipment makers Wednesday failed to reach an agreement on a common format for next-generation wirless-communications technology, Swedish company Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson and Finland's Oy Nokia had submitted their WCDMA, or wideband code division multiple access, proposal to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. Some experts had expected the Nokia-Ericsson format would be approved but it got only 61% of the votes in Wednesday balloting, short of the 71% mark needed in order to pass the first round. Another proposal, promoted by France's Alcatel Alsthom SA, Germany's Siemens AG and Canada's Northern Telecom Ltd., received 39% of the votes. Their proposal is a hybrid of the incompatible CDMA and TDMA digital-cellular formats used in many networks today. The meeting of the 2,000-member ETSI will continue Thursday and the group could decide to hold another vote or try to reach a compromise between the two proposals. The eventual European proposal will be put to the Interational Telecommunication Union, which approves international standards, later this year. Other groups in the U.S. and Asia are also trying to reconcile differences between advanced versions of their respective technologies. At stake is an attempt to set a global standard for so-called third-generation cellular service, which would provide not only voice, but high-speed data and video via wireless networks. The European Union's decision in the late 1980s to adopt the GSM standard helped European companies get a jump on the rest of the world. In current digital-cellular networks, GSM is the most popular format. San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc. commercially developed CDMA technology for digital cellular systems such as PCS, or personal communications services, being launched in the U.S. and elsewhere. CDMA backers have been competing with GSM, which is a variant of TDMA. Japan's Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., the world's largest telephone company, is involved in the WCDMA alliance between Ericsson and Nokia. Ericsson and Nokia are said to have big plans for the Asian market and want to get cozy with NTT but other European companies reportedly want to preserve much more of the GSM/TDMA format.