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.