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To: zbyslaw owczarczyk who wrote (9513)	2/10/1999 3:11:00 PM
From: pat mudge	Respond to of 18016

Zbyslaw -- Good post. I'm guessing BT's responsible for some of the 45% sequential ATM growth. Another LATimes article I found of interest: <<< Monday, February 8, 1999 Wireless Firms Rush To Offer Internet Solutions By AARON PRESSMAN, Reuters PAST STORIES KEY PLAYERS TIMELINE WITNESSES ARGUMENTS KEY DOCUMENTS GLOSSARY DISCUSSION ADVERTISEMENT EW ORLEANS Feb 8--Rapidly growing wireless telecommunications companies sought to hitch their fortunes to the even faster growth of the Internet with a slew of new products and services unveiled Monday. But with so many technologies under development and the market still nascent, analysts warned that some of the deals might flop before consumers are reading e-mail or surfing the net over the airwaves as easily as they do over wires today. At the wireless industry's annual gathering here, software powerhouse Microsoft Corp. showed off its new "microbrowser" for surfing the Internet from a wireless telephone or other device and announced a trial with British Telecommunications Plc to test the new software starting with major corporate clients later this year. Microsoft rival Netscape Communications Corp. announced its own deal with wireless carrier Nextel Communications Inc. . And Cisco Systems Inc., the leader in computer networking gear, will join wireless phone maker Motorola Inc. in a $1 billion five-year effort to build wireless products that use Internet standards. "We all talk about convergence, but frankly we deliver precious little to the customer," said Andy Green, group director for strategy and development at British Telecom. The goal of the new projects such as BT's venture with Microsoft is to simplify wireless data access. "We believe we can span this divide between the richness of computing applications and the real personalized convenience that we all provide as wireless communications companies," Green said. Noting the tremendous interest in wireless data products, Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association president Tom Wheeler said wireless companies wanted to get in on the Internet action. While more than 50 percent of the traffic carried by land-based telecom networks is data, less than two percent of wireless traffic is data, he added. "It's a very, very small piece of our business today," acknowledged Bell Atlantic Global Wireless president Denny Strigle. "But it's growing slowly over time." The Bell Atlantic Corp. unit expects data to grow from two to three percent of revenues today to 10 to 15 percent in five years, Strigle said. Ian Watson, chief executive of Global Light Telecommunications Inc., a Mountain View, Calif.-based telecommunications firm, warned that some of the deals announced Monday might not work out. "Many joint ventures fail because you're just combining two companies' weaknesses," he said. "(In the Cisco-Motorola deal), the question here is whether this venture will emphasize their competitive strengths, or expose their weaknesses." At an afternoon session, Microsoft group vice president Paul Maritz gave the first public demonstration of the "microbrowser," showing live news headlines and e-mail downloaded by wireless telephones and slightly larger Windows CE computers. Headlines displayed only a few words on the tiny phone screen, but then began scrolling across the screen like an electronic message board in Time Square. Maritz said Microsoft would charge phone makers and others only a small one-time fee to include the microbrowser in their products. "Browsers are free and this browser is free," said Maritz, who spent last week in federal court in Washington defending the company's decision to make its full-powered Internet Explorer browser free. Microsoft would make money selling applications that run on corporate or Internet servers and the Windows CE operating system, he added. >>>>