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To: tero kuittinen who wrote (1758)	4/12/1999 1:55:00 PM
From: brian h	Respond to of 34857

Tero, I think the key here is how much has been invested in GSM, not in what the market penetration of GSM is. Building networks accommodating 100 million GSM users (which has already happened) costs a lot. Nokia and ERICY must have contributed a lot in term of vendor financing. China does not have to pour too much of its own capital to build its GSM networks. US telcomm. operators will do the same if allowed to open shops there. It really does not matter if 100 million GSM users networks have been built or not. It is the timing to the market. US politicians are really help GSM world (or European countries) in this sense. It is still too early to say GSM has the whole China. That is simply untrue. No matter which way you want to say. The simple truth is the majority of Chinese over there can not afford a wireless phone if not because of China Telcomm's subsidies. And also the people over there do not need to use phones if China simply do not have enough business activities or jobs available for the average Joe to contact other people with (too expensive and too uneconomical). The people over there will buy daily consumer goods before anything else. Brian H.

To: tero kuittinen who wrote (1758)	4/14/1999 8:07:00 AM
From: brian h	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

Tero, GSM had better watch out its own back. Get really competitive. Another Chinese community decides to go CDMA while GSM has its strong hold. Better watch out. Chips are falling away from GSM fortress. Could you tell me the wireless telcomm. trend using your analytical mind? Remember "Go game" I mentioned earlier? Read those lines. It tells you GSM's early leads really mean nothing to telcomm. operators, does it not? Thst also explains earlier why ACER decided to license Q's CDMA technology and buy Q's ASIC to manufacture its own CDMA phone. Wednesday April 14, 7:16 am Eastern Time INTERVIEW-Taiwan to get U.S. cell phone standard By Angus Chuang TAIPEI, April 14 (Reuters) - Taiwan state-owned Chunghwa Telecommunications plans an eventual launch of U.S.-bred CDMA technology in the island's booming mobile phone sector, dominated by the European GSM standard. ''There are still vast opportunities in what is already a competitive market,'' Chunghwa's Senior Vice President Hsieh Chun-ming told Reuters in a telephone interview. The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard is widely used in Asia outside of Japan, but CDMA or Code Division Multiple Access got a boost in March when U.S. officials said China agreed to allow a nationwide rollout to compete with GSM. CDMA technology, said to offer better communication at a low price, shares radio frequencies digitally and allows many users on the network simultaneously. Hsieh declined to say how much the CDMA system would cost but said it was appropriate for Taiwan's crowded telecommunications market, where Chunghwa and six private vendors launched GSM systems under major liberalisation policies in 1998. ''We have undergone a half year of evaluation which revealed good prospects and maturity of CDMA in terms of technology,'' he said. Hsieh said U.S. research estimated global CDMA subscriptions would swell to 65 million by 2000 from 23 million in 1998. In Taiwan, about five million of the island's 22 million people have mobile phones, 90 percent of which are digital GSM, while 500,000 use earlier-generation analogue technology. Chunghwa hoped to reallocate the radio frequencies used by the analogue system when it was phased out, Hsieh said. The company has about half of the cellular market but Hsieh said there was still plenty of room to grow. ''It's too early to say the market is tight. With 25 percent annual growth in the telecom market, there's nothing that looks like saturation,'' he said, calling his growth forecast conservative. Hsieh said he expected telecom regulators to open the CDMA market to competitive bidding and multiple vendors, meaning a rollout was unlikely before 2002. Chunghwa has not decided which system supplier to use. CDMA vendors include Qualcomm (Nasdaq:QCOM - news), Lucent Technologies (NYSE:LU - news) and Motorola (NYSE:MOT - news) of the United States, Nortel Networks (Toronto:NTL.TO - news)(NYSE:NT - news) of Canada and Samsung [SAGR.CN] of South Korea. The Directorate General of Telecommunications said it had set no limits on mobile phone standards, which continue to evolve. Mobile telephony is one of several sectors parliament opened to private and foreign investment and is dismantling Chunghwa's erstwhile monopoly. Taiwan set out ground rules on Tuesday for ending Chunghwa's lucrative monopoly on local and long-distance fixed-line telephone service. Best, Brian H.