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To: tero kuittinen who wrote (17481)10/31/1998 2:26:00 PM
From: SKIP PAUL  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 152472
 
It is not as simple as you make it out to be.

Why did Sprint go with CDMA instead of AMPS or GSM? According to your logic they should have stayed with the predominant protocol. The answer is that they saw the business opportunity to beat the pants of the existing players who had outdated/expensive technology.



To: tero kuittinen who wrote (17481)10/31/1998 2:46:00 PM
From: brian h  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 152472
 
Tero,

Please do not speak for the Chinese. You may know Nokia, GSM, and Finland. But, you are no Chinese. Nokia is better and continue to please (I mean please!) the Chinese or things will change so dramatically that your whole country may turn upside down.

I thought you told us before each and everyone of Finnish hold a mobil phone. That is about 5.5 million top. Just want to remind you South Korea's CDMA phones in two year since 1996 stand about 7-9 million phones (last I read) and just surpass your whole country's phones population.

And Koreans are good at exporting goods. And I bet in 10 years Korean will ship phones in millions to other countries as long as those countries have the guts to open for importing and allowing for CDMA infrastructure to build there. And here you are telling us CDMA is in a niche market?

Give me a break.

Brian H.



To: tero kuittinen who wrote (17481)11/1/1998 5:04:00 PM
From: Drew Williams  Respond to of 152472
 
<<Business customers and people who travel a lot are choosing GSM. And that's where the operator revenue growth comes from.>>

Maybe there are a lot more people from India and China who travel internationally, but I do not expect this is a significant proportion of any local operators business plan. While those people do provide proportionately more revenue than most, the really significant business is providing mobile service to local people, because there are thousands of them for each regular international traveller.

When Sprint rolled out their CDMA PCS service in Philadelphia about eighteen months ago, the roaming issue was brought up as a potential negative. Sprint's answer was that 90% plus of all cellular users in the United States NEVER! use their phone outside their home area. The study they cited referred to AMPS systems where there were no technical CDMA/TDMA/ETSI/ETC issues to deal with -- just roaming charges. (I could be wrong on the exact percentage, but it was overwhelmingly high.)

As I have said here far too often, the relatively few people who regularly travel internationally will carry satellite phones -- initially, Iridium, but once Globalstar (using Qualcomm's CDMA!) gets up and running, that will be the phone of choice. They cannot afford to worry about compatibility issues, and the satellite phones sidestep the whole thing.

I would be surprised if cellular service in any country is significantly more completely built up than here in southeastern Pennsylvania -- certainly not China or India! -- and there are still gaps here with six functioning local service providers. I live and work less than forty driving miles from center city Philadelphia, and I lose both TDMA and AMPS service between my home in Collegeville and my office in Uwchland (roughly at the intersection of the PA turnpike and route 100.) Until last year I could not get service in my front yard. I expect my experience is fairly common for those of us living in the burbs.

None of this is to say that the GSM vs CDMA issue is not important, especially to Qualcomm and its stockholders, but I believe you and others vastly overrate the importance of business travellers in the overall scheme of things.