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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (19142)	12/4/1998 4:26:00 PM
From: Ruffian	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

3-NEWS> From the Nov. 30, 1998 issue of Wireless Week Economists Oppose Single 3G Standard By Caron Carlson WASHINGTON--A former FCC chief economist has weighed in on the side of the North American GSM Alliance, voicing support for multiple competing standards in the third-generation wireless marketplace. Joseph Farrell, FCC chief economist between 1996 and 1997 and now professor of economics at the University of California-Berkeley, and Michael Topper, senior manager of Cornerstone Research, authored an economic white paper on 3G standards, which the GSM Alliance released last week. The authors conclude that the benefits of multiple standards will be achieved best by permitting both wideband code division multiple access technology and cdma2000 to compete with time division multiple access. In Farrell and Topper's opinion, the government should mandate standards only if it is convinced that a market failure will be worse than the inefficiencies of government mandate. The economists are careful to distinguish between a converged standard resulting from market forces or private standards-setting bodies and one resulting from government mandate, asserting that both run counter to competitive benefits, but the latter is worse than the former. The white paper disputes several claims made by proponents of a converged standard. First, addressing the claim that convergence will create consumer benefits from economies of scale in production and seamless nationwide roaming, the economists say these benefits are likely to evolve without a converged standard. Second, the argument that convergence will spur the creation of jobs in the United States is questionable given evidence that wireless manufacturing jobs are internationally mobile, they contend. They note that equipment using the European-"born" global system for mobile communications standard is built in the United States and Asia as well as Europe, while the U.S.-originating CDMA and TDMA standards are incorporated into products built overseas. "It would therefore be a leap of faith to assume that a U.S.-mandated third-generation standard would lead to lasting benefits for U.S. manufacturers or manufacturing workers," the paper said. Farrell and Topper present several other arguments against mandated convergence: Multiple standards can create more product variety, create stronger incentives for innovation, reduce incremental buildout costs and avoid "thorny problems" created by regulation. Perhaps the white paper's most reassuring finding for the layperson is the learned scholars' determination that "there appears to be much uncertainty about the relative technical merits of proposed third-generation standards." Permitting the two proposals to compete will allow the market to judge their relative performance merits, rather than force policy makers to do so in the dark. \| Home Page \| Site Map \| Search Archive \| PowerSearch \| \| International \| Wireless Web Sites \| Hot Stories \| Please send comments and suggestions on this Web site to jcollins@chilton.net Wireless Week, 600 S. Cherry St., #400, Denver, CO 80246 Voice: 303-393-7449, Fax: 303-399-2034 Published by Cahners Business Information © Copyright 1998. All rights reserved.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (19142)	12/4/1998 4:28:00 PM
From: Ruffian	Respond to of 152472

CDG-W-CDMA Comments> From the Nov. 30, 1998 issue of Wireless Week CDG Spells Out W-CDMA Drawbacks By Peggy Albright Could it be that the next round in the already hard-to-follow third generation wireless standards debate could begin in a footnote? The CDMA Development Group officially distributed its 3G white paper at the CDG Americas Congress press summit in Los Angeles this month. A central argument in the paper is that wideband code division multiple access technology, the global system for mobile communications-based proposal for the global 3G standard, won't work in the United States. "We haven't been vocal on some issues," said Perry LaForge, executive director of the CDG. "There has been pressure to be quiet" on the effect of W-CDMA's chip rate on system performance, channel interference and FCC power emissions requirements, he said. In addition, manufacturers have been reluctant to get involved because they are "afraid of reprisals in European markets." W-CDMA, proposed to the International Telecommunication Union by GSM technology advocates, would use a 4.096 megabits per second chip rate. Cdma2000, proposed by CDMA advocates, uses a 3.6864 Mbps chip rate. The CDG said in the white paper that, "What proponents of the W-CDMA chip rate often overlook are the negative effects on spectrum use and power emissions by using the higher value chip rate. The CDMA air interface signal of IMT-2000 needs to fit into a 5 MHz spectrum to comply with different frequency plans around the world." To substantiate this argument, the white paper cites a similar finding in an Aug. 19 document published by the American National Standards Institute's T1P1's harmonization ad hoc committee. T1P1 is the U.S. standards organization that submitted the rival W-CDMA proposal to the ITU. According to the CDG's footnote, T1P1 showed that "even with a difficult-to-realize, complex filter, the 4.096 Mbps rate signal does not meet the FCC out-of-band emission requirement for a 5 MHz deployment." Techniques suggested for mitigating these effects would themselves offset some of the capacity advantages offered by the larger chip rate, the CDG said. For CDMA operators, incremental deployment of 3G services via cdma2000 upgrades would in fact yield greater overall capacity, it said. When asked if T1P1 would have proposed a standard that is problematic for deployment in the U.S., Asok Chatterjee, chairman of the T1P1 committee and vice president of technology for ADC Telecommunications, confirmed that the language did appear in the harmonization committee's Aug. 19 report, but said the language in question presented just one of multiple viewpoints. "It was a view that was expressed. However, there was definitely no consensus on this issue because there were opposing views," he said. One vendor siding with the CDG in the harmonization debate at the Americas Congress was Lucent Technologies Inc., which announced it is working with both Bell Atlantic Mobile Inc. and Sprint PCS to begin testing phase one of cdma2000 on those systems. David Poticny, vice president for global wireless strategy at Lucent, presented the economic and technical case for converging the two standards, saying, "Harmonization would be very advantageous to the industry" because it costs less and is less complex. The vendor also said that "wideband CDMA for data services is not a simple business case," for transitioning to 3G, according to a Lucent document on manufacturer 3G requirements. W-CDMA's drawbacks, this document said, are that it requires new radio equipment and new subscriber handsets; there is no "ready base" of applications or subscribers; and "standards issues that still to be resolved [are] pushing the deployment time frames out beyond 2000." \| Home Page \| Site Map \| Search Archive \| PowerSearch \| \| International \| Wireless Web Sites \| Hot Stories \| Please send comments and suggestions on this Web site to jcollins@chilton.net Wireless Week, 600 S. Cherry St., #400, Denver, CO 80246 Voice: 303-393-7449, Fax: 303-399-2034 Published by Cahners Business Information © Copyright 1998. All rights reserved.