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To: Mika Kukkanen who wrote (2567)	1/18/1999 2:58:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 5390

Mika, the USA multi-standards in cellphones probably had more to do with the early and rapid development of analogue in the USA. It reached a critical mass early on so later technologies were nichefied. Also, there is a peculiar effect in the USA in that they mostly develop the wondrous new technologies, but Joe Big Mac is not particularly fast at adopting them. New Zealand is all sheep, develops very little world scale technology, but adopts all the gizmoes flat out. On consumers being winners or losers, Sprint offers a dime a minute anywhere in the USA. What price is it for a GSM call from say Seville to Berlin? I presume you are in a position to talk about this subject since you are now the defender of the consumer rather than a proponent of GSM. Actually, I think Susan Ness is more in a position to talk about it than you are as the FCC is the body created by elected representatives to handle voters' concerns and 'the national interest' whatever that is thought to be by those in power at any particular time to suit themselves. How many clicks did consumers give you to represent their views? I suspect the major concern she shares with other US government policy makers is to keep their jobs and taxpayer's money flowing. Maurice

To: Mika Kukkanen who wrote (2567)	1/18/1999 8:44:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5390

Mika - Sorry, Ms Ness, but you are not in a position to talk about this subject. The US multi-standard approach has been a contributing factor in the US trailing Europe in digital mobile telephony. Well, I agree that perhaps she was both somewhat tactless (ugly Americanitus - although realistically it isn't confined to Americans), and not completely accounting for the difference between the US and the Europe of 10 years ago, it is still true that there is some benefit to competition between standards. By fostering competition between standards you may get somewhat less efficiency of scale for each standard, but you do get better standards faster than you otherwise would. And now that Europe has deregulated many of their national telephony companies I think there would be much less problem with each country and region within Europe having their own standard. (i.e. I suspect that if they allowed competition between standards they would, within a year or two, still have 2 or 3 systems, each with almost complete European coverage. May the best system win.) Clark