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Technology Stocks : NEXTEL -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Arnie Doolittle who wrote (6453)	5/30/1998 4:08:00 AM
From: wonk	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 10227

Arnie: I stuck my foot in it, didn't I. Oh well here goes. Are you saying that iDEN has the least desirable voice quality, T voice quality is slightly better and FON voice quality is the best of the 3? No, I wouldn't phrase it that way. All these systems, properly designed can provide voice quality which is virtually indistinguishable. Good RF engineering mitigates the disadvantage of fewer bits, bad RF engineering highlights it. Ah, that's the question: Are all other factors equal or is iDEN superior/equal to T's TDMA and FON's CDMA in ways that it compensates for the reduced bandwidth per voice channel? I would have to say more bits translates into relative advantage. Good initial design provides roughly equivalent voice quality. The real problem for all mobile wireless comes when the system loads up and more interference is generated. Again, being very simplistic, the system with the fewer bits per channel will be effected more and degrade more rapidly. CDMA, D-AMPS and GSM have a relative advantage. (OTOH, Nextel seems to now have sufficient spectrum and they got it relatively cheap. Seems like a fair trade) Good management can prevent noticeable degradation by adding capacity and cell sites before the problems happen. [On soapbox] Every cellular and PCS operator has the exact same problem Nextel had in New York. Quality slips, customers complain, and the company has to make an explanation and public promise to fix. Same thing happens in cellular; Sprint and PrimeCo in brand new PCS systems have tripped up too. Yet, the engineers know when the system will begin to degrade. The problem is actually a mgt and budgeting problem. For example, beginning of the fiscal year, sales and revenue targets are set. Based upon those targets, capital equipment is ordered and new capacity and site planning is started. Corporate finance allocates funds. One small problem though. If the company exceeds its growth targets (or if mkt and sales has low-balled their budgets to look great later in the year), then the system reaches its capacity constraints before the new infrastructure is on-line and on top of that, the budgeted infrastructure is still insufficient to service the new projected subscriber load. Generally, engineering and finance spent 9 months out of the year running around with their pants on fire trying to eliminate capacity "brownouts" and then the whole budget cycle starts again. [Off soapbox] I'm confused. Does FON's CDMA get 8 calls per 1000 MHZ or not? I'm under the impression that CDMA has greater theoretical capacity than TDMA, although I've also heard that CDMA's weakness is data and that TDMA will eat CDMA's lunch when widespread use of wireless data transmission occurs. My apologies for the confusion. The numbers are correct for PCS-1900, (GSM) used by Western Wireless, Pac Bell Mobile, Bell South. Sprint PCS (FON) uses CDMA. The capacity of CDMA, is "still" a subject of debate. The folks on the Qualcomm thread would argue that you should at least double the TDMA number for CDMA. Regarding data, right now all the competing air interfaces are pretty weak. All the mfgs are working to improve data throughput. Time will tell who is eventually better, if anyone. All I would suggest you think about is that bit "payload." The more payload you allocate for data transmission (to increase speed), the less you have for voice. Your crystal ball is as good as mine as to how it will be billed. Are you saying that iDEN requires NXTL to predetermine how many channels are allocated to DC and how many are for digital cellular? If it's any help, NXTL says that 2/3 of their traffic is Direct Connect (6:1). In the old days of analog SMR, yes, voice channels were dedicated between cellular-like calls (interconnect) and direct connect (trunking). To be frank, I do not know if MOT's iDEN reconfigures on the fly. If I have some time, I'll play around with some capacity calculations using a 2/3 DC. ww