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To: tero kuittinen who wrote (1668)	3/23/1999 11:37:00 PM
From: JGoren	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

Sour grapes Tero. Maybe China wanted what it thought was the best, most-advanced technology and did not want to spend a lot of resources on old GSM. Besides, if it wants a piece of the pie, wouldn't it want the new technology that will have the greatest increase in sales over the future? To blame it on US pressure is, I think, too simplistic.

To: tero kuittinen who wrote (1668)	3/24/1999 9:51:00 AM
From: Clarksterh	Respond to of 34857

But it's not good for the world trade if bilateral agreements start proliferating. That's the road to protectionism. Well, I agree with you here, but it is a mystery how you make the leap from anti-protectionism to anti-opening-up markets. Again, I'd be concerned if the US said you must buy US, but they didn't. In fact I would bet that the biggest beneficiaries of the new China policy is Korea, not the US. If China decides to want a GSM-only solution, that decision can be justified at looking at the growth patterns of GSM markets - they are much better than the growth in multiple standard countries like USA and Russia. Hardly. You have a Eurocentric view (we had lousy penetration before GSM, and great penetration after. Therefore global adoption of GSM is the solution.). Lets look at the arguments for this: 1) It is often said that Europe had lousy penetration before GSM because they had multiple standards. This is part of the picture, but is not the whole picture. Europe was impeded not by multiple standards but by nationalized wireless companies where telephony was largely restricted to nationalized companies. There are two ways to fix the resultant roaming problems - un-nationalize the phone companies, or get national agreements to use the same standard. You tend to focus on the latter and ignore the former (note that the former is now a big driver behind convergence of 3g CDMA systems - e.g. Vodafone.) 2) You give an example of the US as a country with lousy penetration because of lack of one standard but this is very misleading. The US had one standard, (AMPS) long before Europe did and yet they did not have the penetration rate. If it was as simple as global roaming, ... . Obviously it isn't that simple. There are a whole variety of factors including CPP and quality/cost of wireline service. If this doesn't persuade you, you need only look at the fact that with dual mode phones there is mostly digital national roaming in the US and has been for several years, and yet the penetration rate still stinks compared to Europe. 3) You give an example of Russia as a country with lousy penetration rates because of a lack of a mobile standard. Hardly. Their economy stinks, so of course they are going to have a lousy growth rate. If the Per Capita GDP is shrinking it is hard to see how anyone new is going to be able to buy a phone. The bottom line is that the argument about a national standard, while it has some validity, is really a self-serving monopolistic tactic and is actually probably counterproductive. For instance, in several of the earlier China stories it was apparent that the company that owns the GSM monopoly had better connections and was squashing CDMA for their own reasons, but using your argument about multiple standards. There are many, many ways to ensure global roaming while minimizing government intrusion. That is all the US wants - a level playing field. Clark