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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Connolly who wrote (4308)	2/21/1999 11:05:00 AM
From: James Connolly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10309

Wireless future promises pocket computers for all Found this article on a Yahoo thread. The standard it talks about UMTS is basically QCOM's CDMA technology. SIX WEEKS AGO I asked BT why it had forgotten to apply any call allowances to the bill for my ISDN line. Four weeks later, after hearing nothing, I called again, only to be told by a surly "customer services" woman that "we have a lot of complaints and we deal with them in the order they come in". Today, I am still in the dark and minded to implement the "I'll read it when I feel like it" policy to the next bill from BT. Why does a big, fat, profitable company behave like this? Monopoly, of course. If you want ISDN, only BT can supply it. The good - no, the wonderful - news is that BT's grip on the nation's throat is going to disappear - and a lot sooner than most of us appreciate. I was in Berlin recently, listening to Siemens, a huge player in the convergence of telecoms and computing, set out its stall. It sounded mouthwatering. The technology to watch is called UMTS, which stands for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System. Services will start in 2002, probably for businesses to begin with but if Siemens is right it will be mass market in no time at all. UMTS is a descendant of today's GSM digital networks but advanced a long way out of the primordial digital slime. GSM is great technology - reliable, with reasonable quality and excellent international coverage (except in America which hates any standard it hasn't invented itself). But it's basic stuff. The data rate is pathetic. Coverage and bandwidth are still flaky. The likes of Orange may blather on about how you can get rid of your normal BT line and use a mobile instead, but for most of us that's a pipedream. UMTS will be on an different plane. For starters, the data rate is phenomenal - 2M bytes per second if you are in a "cell" close to a transmitter, or 384k bytes for normal mobile use. At that rate, videophones become an everyday reality, along with television and radio on demand and multimedia Internet content surpassing anything available to the average consumer today. You will be able to hand everyone in the family their own communicator, with its individual number, and let them use it wherever they like. The fixed, landline phone system will become obsolete if UMTS delivers everything it promises. Will the BT dinosaur become extinct? No, it will evolve. Over the next year the government will auction UMTS licences and it is already clear that BT, probably in partnership with Microsoft, will be among the bidders. If they win, they could call it The Ugly Sisters Phone Company. All the existing mobile players will be fighting in there too. The future is surely wireless. The battle won't only be fought on the airways. Someone is going to come up with the operating system that powers the third generation of Net-savvy mobile phones. Three players have thrown their hats in the ring: Microsoft, with Windows CE, Sun, with its Java derivative Jini, and the Symbian consortium that sprang out of Psion. The big hardware companies like Siemens are playing it safe; the company makes CE palmtops, has a relationship with Symbian, and will doubtless take a look at Jini at as well. Software will, I suspect, be like UMTS itself: a single standard. So whoever wins that battle will be the Microsoft of tomorrow, if it's not the Microsoft of today. But delivery - the choice of company that provides your UMTS service - will be savagely competitive, even more so than GSM phones today. The era when a single company enjoyed a sweeping monopoly simply through the ownership of a network of copper wires is coming to an end. And I can't wait.