Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
yah, it could be flo...
could be wrong, but i don't think think so - might be something else, faster than wimax or lte...
follow the money...
is broadcast tv over mobile a maker? compared to tdd with mc/bc services over a 4-g like service, with access to...
who knows?
sfx
Not to brag... good market so far...
Invested 1000 shares each on 1/1/2005 in a trust fund (long story, old hands know the longer story)...
QCOM, GOOG, EBAY, RIMM, YHOO, SBUX, AMZN, DNA, AMGN, AAPL, DELL, CSCO, WMT, IDCC, ARMHY, A, HPQ
Look at the numbers and the return... looks like things are working out. There have been some side plays, but this was built as a core holding on Jan 1, 2005.
It's been fun :^)
sfx
Disgruntled Sprint Shareholders: Right Track, Wrong Direction
http://gigaom.com/2007/06/22/sprint-wimax-shareholder-issues/
By Jesse Kopelman
Lately there has been much talk of shareholder dissatisfaction with Sprint’s WiMAX plans and the possibility of a need for a less ambitious rollout or perhaps calling the whole thing off. Some think the root of the issue is the unproven nature of WiMAX as a technology, but in truth technology barely enters the picture. It’s not that these shareholders want Sprint to spend less money on WiMAX – they just want Sprint to spend less money.
The real question is one of fundamental strategy. Is it better to keep striving for organic growth in a realm of ever diminishing margins or is it better to focus on near-term profitability through cost containment?
Clearly, the disgruntled shareholders are a lot less worried about the long term health of the company than they are about making money right now. These are exactly the same sort of people who just took Alltel private. Management designed to maximize profit purely through reducing expenditures will certainly kill the company over time, but such a death by a thousand cuts is slow and in the meantime quite profitable for ownership.
One thing that I agree strongly with these disgruntled shareholders on is that Sprint’s current plan doesn’t make much sense. You can’t pretend that WiMAX and the existing network are complimentary. If WiMAX succeeds it will do so at the expense of 3G and circuit switched voice. Reading between the lines, Sprint’s strategy is to keep the old stuff puttering around as long as possible as a cash cow to pay for expansion of WiMAX and at some point down the road, once the customer numbers are right, take it offline and repurpose the spectrum.
This is exactly what AT&T Wireless and Cingular did in their transition from TDMA to GSM. Such a plan looks very nice on paper, but doesn’t translate so well to the real world. As AT&T Wireless and Cingular discovered running two disparate networks simultaneously is easier said then done. Meanwhile, Sprint is already running two disparate networks as it struggles to integrate Nextel.
Going for the hat trick when you’ve got plenty of competition waiting eagerly to scoop up your increased churn borders on masochistic. The short answer to all of this seems to be that WiMAX should be run as a separate company from the existing business, but perhaps things are a bit more complicated?
As Sprint sees it, there is a fundamental synergy between the legacy network and WiMAX. By leveraging dual radio devices and the pretty decent performance of the EVDO Rev. A, already available throughout Sprint’s national coverage area, there is a lot less pressure to build out WiMAX quickly.
What Sprint can do is build out WiMAX in only the high demand areas initially and still offer a national service that is superior to competitors 3G. Unfortunately, much like the idea of a graceful balance between concurrent disparate networks, this is another idea that looks good on paper but falls short in the real world. As Yoda would tell us, “do or do not, there is no try.”
The money wasted on subsidizing the more expensive dual radio user devices and trying to run multiple networks would be better spent on just making a WiMAX network that can stand on its own. Meanwhile, WiMAX only gives about a two year head start on UMB and LTE. If Sprint isn’t well built out before Verizon can start deploying UMB, what have they gained? Again, all signs point to running WiMAX as a separate business.
Where I agree with the disgruntled shareholders is that Sprint’s current plan won’t work. Where I disagree is on what to do about it. Rather than give up on WiMAX, I say give up on the legacy business. Let the disgruntled shareholders take it private and ride it into the ground or sell it to the cable companies and let Cox, TW, and Comcast play at being SBC and Bellsouth running Cingular. Either way, sell it and use the proceeds to buy Clearwire and pay for a world class all IP network based on WiMAX.
Why WiMAX? Why not hold the course on CDMA2000 and just spend more money on having a better version of the same thing as Verizon Wireless? Well, first off; Verizon Wireless is more than $3B better than Sprint right now. They got the best network by spending the most money and the only way to beat them using identical technology is to spend more than they do. What about the other option, listen to the disgruntled shareholders and squeeze all the juice out of what you’ve got while the fruit is still ripe?
This option probably requires taking the company private, but that seems easy enough these days. As a consumer, I can’t work up much excitement over the idea, though. Sure, more price based competition is nice, but it seems like the wireless market is skewed too far that way, already. What would really be nice is some innovation on the business model side. This was the hope behind the MVNO, but perhaps it was too much to ask considering that MVNO relied on the same old networks. Perhaps a new carrier, with an all IP network and no legacy business to protect, is just what we need.
QCOM-IDCC - interesting discussion
Wouldn't it be interesting if Q could package all the IPR for WCDMA chipset customers in the same manner they accomplished for IS-95...and lowering the overall rate that the manufacturers would have to pay if they licensed individually?
With the QCOM licensing model, yes... it would be nice. Unfortunately, companies that work hard to establish their own IP don't necessarily get what's due to them in a pass through scenario...
IMO one of the issues with BRCM is they don't want to sign the standard agreement with Q which gives Q the capability to pass through to their customers any BRCM IP.
Broadcom tends to license not on the terminal level, e.g. the total device, but on a chip level, where the license is a portion of the total cost of the baseband/rf/mac/software stack, and that relieves implementors of additional royalty burden. It's a fixed cost when you buy their chip, it's already priced in.
Qualcomm, on the other hand, says, we'll flat-rate license all out patents, whether you use them or not, but at a price, that being a cut of the the total ASP.
The issue here is that what is the Qualcomm value-added part?
Let's say I'm a handset vendor (truth be told, I'm not). I decide I'm going to make a high-tier handset that has some, and I reiterate, some QC IP in it, mostly related to CDMA.
Then I add my own R&D costs for application, perhaps I make this also a WIFI/WIMAX multiple mode device, and add on Windows CE. Due to complexity of the device, I have to add a coprocessor to the design, and add a lot of goodies that I don't get with Qualcomm's chip or software.
Now... the QCOM impact to my Bill of Materials is 40-50 dollars at most, consider MSM6800, a DO-Rev A chip.
The co-processor, licenses for the upper layer operating system, integration of items that QC doesn't provide, etc...
The BOM is now 200 dollars... add 30 percent for conversion, warranty reserve, and we still need to consider costs of distribution and a decent profit for the effort I've expended on R&D to bring this device to the market...
QC, according to docs on the web, is 5 percent of ASP, not BOM... which is basically a tax on all things in the device, whether there is QC value added or not.
It's not what QC provides, but what they take that is, to be honest, is not their due. The "pass-through" makes things very difficult, as QCOM's share of the pass-through, if any, is not transparent.
This my friends... is the main beef against Qualcomm and their licensing program. I would rather have a fixed cost on the QCOM provided content only...
NOK could, as well as BRCM, could live with a fixed percentage on the chips, not on the product as a whole.
sfx
Disclosure - I'm not an investor in BRCM, I'm still heavy on QCOM, NOK, MOT, and some others (IDCC) in this sector. I've made my opinions known to QC IR...
DR - IDCC and QCOM
Data_Roxx, I'm a shareholder in both companies as well. IDCC may have a difficult rep in the internet board community (specifically due to a couple of people), but in the long run, I don't have any problems with them.
off-topic, but I've met several IDCC folks, and they're just as bright and talented as the QC people I've met over the years.
IMHO, QCOM needs Interdigital to remain independent. Combining the two patent portfolios would cause more problems than it solves considering the situation that Q is in right now from a legal perspective.
It's a sad, sad thing to note that the best career path in telecom at the moment is not engineering, but stepping up to the legal bar.
sfx
BTW - correction in my earlier post, it was Linkabit, not telebit, don't know why I made that error.
QCOM taking over IDCC?
Probably not going to happen, based on the history between the two companies. Sounds more like an analyst's wet dream...
PJ and the board might support it, but as long as Irwin Jacobs is alive, I personally don't think the proposal would go anywhere.
It's still Irwin's company, he's a major shareholder, and there is that issue that goes way back between what is IDCC and Telebit.
Besides, considering the legal mess that Qualcomm is in, IDCC on the side is not a bad thing.
sfx
TD-SCDMA makes a lot of sense for the PHS markets that have nowhere to go in China, IMHO. Those who follow China know that MPT has been very aggressive at deploying PHS for limited mobility situations, and now they must make a choice moving forward. There are technical reasons why TD-SCDMA makes sense here...
IMHO, if China had not granted licenses for UMTS and cdma2000, it would have prohibited terminal and network development for Chinese based companies on the global market.
And in the end, would have put China in a consumer related bind for the 2008 Olympics, where hundreds of thousands of roamers would not have had access. Keeping in mind that the PRC gov't still has substantial stakes in both China Mobile and China Unicom...
sfx
'net debit' straddle.
It's considered by some as a longish position... makes most sense if the person expects significant volatility, as it limits losses on the downside, but is unclear on the upside.
Nice explanation here...
http://www.optiontradingpedia.com/free_long_straddle.htm
sfx
China approves use of foreign 3G standards
http://www.telecomasia.net/article.php?type=article&id_article=4542
(Xinhua via NewsEdge) China's Ministry of Information Industry approved the use of European and American standards for 3G mobile phones that are rivals to China's homegrown TD-SCDMA.
"The three world standards will all be used in China," said Yang Peifang, secretary general of the ministry's telecommunication economist panel.
China's homegrown TD-SCDMA has been called the "Chinese 3G standard", W-CDMA is European and cdma2000 is American.
By adding the two foreign standards to the Chinese market, the government has consolidated its "technology neutral" stance and offered an open market for different technologies, said analysts.
"The introduction of the other two standards will help improve TD- SCDMA," said Yang.
China's 3G development depends primarily on strong demand for mobile data processing functions involving multimedia solutions and Internet connections.
China's major four operators, China Netcom, China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom, have started training 3G talents, constituting a war chest and making technological preparations for a smooth transition from the existing mobile telecom networks or PHS networks to 3G.
China's homegrown technology for 3G mobile communication passed a series of tests organized by the ministry last year.
"We will let operators choose which standard they want to use. But the government will decide how many 3G licenses are issued," said Xi Guohua, Vice Minister of Information Industry.
© 2007 Xinhua News Agency
© 2007 Dialog, a Thomson business. All rights reserved
China approves use of foreign 3G standards
http://www.telecomasia.net/article.php?type=article&id_article=4542
(Xinhua via NewsEdge) China's Ministry of Information Industry approved the use of European and American standards for 3G mobile phones that are rivals to China's homegrown TD-SCDMA.
"The three world standards will all be used in China," said Yang Peifang, secretary general of the ministry's telecommunication economist panel.
China's homegrown TD-SCDMA has been called the "Chinese 3G standard", W-CDMA is European and cdma2000 is American.
By adding the two foreign standards to the Chinese market, the government has consolidated its "technology neutral" stance and offered an open market for different technologies, said analysts.
"The introduction of the other two standards will help improve TD- SCDMA," said Yang.
China's 3G development depends primarily on strong demand for mobile data processing functions involving multimedia solutions and Internet connections.
China's major four operators, China Netcom, China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom, have started training 3G talents, constituting a war chest and making technological preparations for a smooth transition from the existing mobile telecom networks or PHS networks to 3G.
China's homegrown technology for 3G mobile communication passed a series of tests organized by the ministry last year.
"We will let operators choose which standard they want to use. But the government will decide how many 3G licenses are issued," said Xi Guohua, Vice Minister of Information Industry.
© 2007 Xinhua News Agency
© 2007 Dialog, a Thomson business. All rights reserved
Qualcomm's Lauer Disses WiMAX
http://gigaom.com/2007/04/26/qualcomms-lauer-disses-wimax/
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher
Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 7:31 AM PT
We thought Qualcomm might be finally embracing WiMAX, given its recent purchase of TeleCIS’ mobile WiMAX assets. Not so much. Len Lauer, Qualcomm’s Executive Vice President and Group president, gave WiMAX the smackdown at the Wireless Innovations conference on Wednesday.
Lauer said WiMAX is more expensive to deploy than cellular networks, while cellular can provide the equivalent bandwidth. He also pointed to poor early reviews of South Korea’s network as an example of why the technology isn’t all that “revolutionary.” Harsh, though not unexpected since Qualcomm’s whole reason for existence is CDMA and WCDMA.
Ironically, Lauer was the CTO at Sprint around the time the company made its decision to deploy a WiMAX network. Was it a bone of contention for him then? Who knows. Here are some of the good bits from his anti-WiMAX speech:
On WiMAX vs cellular speeds:
There’s a lot of talk about WiMAX, as a great revolution in the wireless industry. The fact is, it is not a revolution as far as architecture. Whether it’s CDMA or WCDMA technology, there is a tremendous amount of bandwidth that is being delivered in these architectures. When I say bandwidth, on the down link it can run 2 to 4 to 6 to 8 mbps per second and that is similar to what we are getting with cable modems throughout the world. It’s an assertion that WiMAX can only deliver these speeds, and you can’t do that with WCDMA and CDMA. In fact you can.
On WiMAX cost:
The second assertion on WiMAX is that it is very low cost. Well our view, and we think we know architecture pretty well, is that WiMAX is actually a higher cost to deploy than a WCDMA or CDMA2000 network. We see it as having cost disadvantages.
On WiMAX bad reviews:
In terms of performance characteristics, we're are willing to compete with WiMAX any day of the week. . . If you look at it now in South Korea there a number of press articles written that the results are very disappointing, they only have a few thousand users. But if you look at CDMA or WCDMA where there are hundreds of thousands to millions of users.
OT - Qualcomm heir turns to baseball
http://valleywag.com/tech/bad-education/qualcomm-heir-turns-to-baseball-242352.php
You'll remember that High Tech High Bayshore, the Redwood City charter school, is to close. An unnamed backer, who had lent the venture its premises, decided to offload the building. That couldn't have anything to do with Gary Jacobs' bid for a stadium in Southern California, could it?
Jacobs, son of the billionaire telecom entrepreneur who founded Qualcomm, is chairman of the board of High Tech High and main funder of its network of seven innovative charter schools. A worthy project; but Jacobs has other calls on his wallet. He's trying to buy a stadium from the city of Lake Elsinore, between Los Angeles and San Diego, where the heir to the Qualcomm fortune already owns a baseball team.
Mandarin lessons for Palo Alto high-schoolers? Too stressful, at least for the nativists. Homework? Overrated, according to an elementary school in Menlo Park. Personalized lessons for disadvantaged children at High Tech High? Too expensive for anyone to step in and buy the premises. But at least California kids have baseball.
GDC2007: Interesting things from Qualcomm
http://blog.redherring.com/Home/173
GDC had plenty of stuff devoted to mobile earlier this week and I had a nice chat with Gameloft about the future growth of their business, but a recent demo with Qualcomm proved to be pretty interesting. I caught up with Mike Yuen, director of the company's gaming group and he took me through a pretty cool product demo.
The tech: a new version of the company's uiOne solution for mobile devices. I unfortunately don't have any images for you, but consider it a complete application for pushing content to a mobile device. With iTunes and Xbox Live-inspired elements, the features and potential applications are numerous—friend lists, links to related content, rewards programs, and much more. Yuen said he sees it appealing to everyone from Pogo players to hardcore folks.
They're building the service this year with a commercial rollout planned for 2008, which Yuen said can be delivered in modules. Carriers can take location-based services, decide to go with gaming, choose something for music, or all of it—using shared account info. Pretty cool.
Sold as a white-label, the current version of uiOne is already being used by Telecom Italia Mobile, which launched it in December. No word on additional carriers yet.
Better mobile interfaces lead to more activity and ultimately higher spending, which everyone wants. No secrets there.
IDCC Hostile Takeover...
While Qualcomm might have the cash to do it (to the benefit of us IDCC shareholders I might add), Broadcom has the incentive to get a hold of the IDCC patent portfolio.
Moreover, hostile takeovers are not QCOM's style...
Just my 2 cents...
sfx
You can pick up the nickels, but watch out for the steamroller...
;^)
sfx
with 1x and later... NOK didn't make chips
So far as head-to-head competition is concerned, if NOK starts making chips or Q resumes handset manufacture we can try that.
They used a custom version of the ST Micro CDMA chipset... old history now...
Only CDMA (IS2000 1x) chipset vendors now are QCOM and Via Telecom... ST Micro packed up and moved on to 3GPP specific items...
sfx
Qualcomm to add more WCDMA chip orders with Taiwan makers
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20070303PB200.html
Qualcomm is expected to add to the amount of orders for its WCDMA chips with Taiwan-based semiconductor makers, with the orders to be the first large batch of orders for handset chips for Taiwan, according to equipment makers, as quoted by the Chinese-language Commercial Times.
As a result, sales of Qualcomm's Taiwan-based partners such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) and Kinsus Interconnect Technology will be significantly boosted, the paper said.
The orders from Qualcomm with TSMC will be for 90nm technology and more advanced, and this will help boost the utilization rate at TSMC's 12-inch plant (Fab 14) to 85-90%, the equipment makers were cited as saying.
Just as a reminder, for those really long term B&H...
The tape tells the tale... which stock retained value since the 2000 bubble burst...it's pretty clear that in a long view, QCOM has done pretty good...
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=QCOM&t=my&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=IDCC,BRCM,NOK,eric
Short term, it's a different picture, but astute wireless investors don't fall in love/hate with a stock... IDCC has performed pretty well over the last year or so...
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=QCOM&t=1y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=IDCC,BRCM,NOK,eric
It's a long term, short term view... it all depends on when you jump in the game...
sfx
Finally, Lil’ Peace on Planet Mobile
My comments:
1) QCOM vs. BRCM - good news, maybe knock-on effect for the other suits between the two. Make business, not lawsuits, and may the best product win.
2) MediaFLO and Cingular - don't miss the obvious here... this is a rear-guard action against DVB and other small device television broadcast technology. With Verizon Wireless and ATT (ex-Cingular) in the bag, MediaFLO will be the dominant tech in this arena, and it will exist outside of handsets at some point.
3) Alcatel-Lucent/Microsoft - SW patents flat out suck, and stifle innovation. I'm not a big fan of MSFT, but at the same time, I'm a capitalist. $1.5BUSD is way beyond the damages caused by this supposed infringement.
and lastly Apple-Cisco and the iPhone...
Silly stuff... Apple should have done their homework, but at the same time, Cisco should not have submarined the TM for such a long time.
Oh well...
Have a good weekend,
sfx
Om Malik on Broadband
http://gigaom.com/2007/02/23/finally-lil-peace-on-planet-mobile/
At least for this week, the mobile industry’s largest and most litigious companies laid down some of their arms and gave us oh-so brief warm and snuggly feelings. OK, with the exception of that whole Alcatel-Lucent/Microsoft thing.
Cisco’s battle over the iPhone ended with a shared trademark and some very vague plans to possibly, maybe, one day, explore interoperability between some products. Now Qualcomm and Broadcom and their pack-dog legal teams have called a truce on certain patent claims in their ongoing lawsuits.
Broadcom and Qualcomm say the companies have dismissed all claims and counterclaims associated with 2 patents belonging to Qualcomm and 2 patents belonging to Broadcom. The companies will not go to court in March, as previously scheduled. Though, that’s only an agreement over these patent disputes, and the companies will still battle over other issues. Qualcomm’s press release says that they and Broadcom are dismissing claims “with prejudice,” — so obviously this isn’t anywhere near the end of their issues.
But perhaps Qualcomm is feeling optimistic (generous?) now that they’ve gotten AT&T in their corner on MediaFLO. On Thursday Reuters quoted Qualcomm’s CEO Paul Jacobs as saying that he thought the AT&T deal might help talks with Nokia over renewing a technology license.
“The MediaFlo deal with Cingular is a new fact. Maybe there’s a way to find some new common ground there,” Jacobs said.
Maybe the companies are all getting as tired of spending money on legal disputes as we are of reading (and writing) about them. Or at least the ones with their endless monster legal proceedings. Nah, it’s probably more coincidence than anything else that there’s been a week of agreements. Well, for this week at least, we’ll hand around the peace pipe. Next week they can all start fighting again.
4G IP landscape to be more varied than 3G, but Qualcomm will have a say
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20070215PR209.html
One of the major factors that has kept average royalty rates very high in WCDMA devices is the fact that 12 companies own 80% of the essential IP, with four of those owning nearly 60%. In order to access essential patents, device vendors not among that top four are subject to cumulative royalty rates that can climb to 28.5%.
ABI Research asserts that the 4G royalty landscape will be far more diverse, and this alone will allow average royalty rates in 4G devices to be lower than in their 3G equivalents. License trading will be more commonplace, especially in the WiMAX environment, where over 350 companies own essential IP.
ABI Research wireless research director Stuart Carlaw indicated that a more diverse 4G IP landscape will allow more companies to trade licenses rather than be required to pay royalty fees to access others' IP. This will result in low average royalty rates. He added that this diverse IP landscape will not be a product of litigation or regulation, but of pure market mechanisms. Companies that see the benefits of a strong IP portfolio are now ploughing huge funds into R&D in order to capture patents.
A study by the market research firm found that although the original motivation to choose OFDM based technologies was to loosen Qualcomm's hold on the market, its acquisitions of Flarion and Airgo give it essential IP in all 4G technologies. There could also be a case of "out of the frying pan and into the fire" regarding WiMAX, where it is likely that Samsung will hold close to 30% of the essential IP, effectively replacing Qualcomm as the 800-pound gorilla in the market.
3GSM: WiFi Meshing catches even WiFi phones in its net
by Guy J Kewney | posted on 13 February 2007
http://www.newswireless.net/index.cfm/article/3209
[off hand - if you have a newsfeeder, might want to add this guy -- sfx]
Wi-Next and Nicola de CarneA serious contender in the "do it yourself" Internet mesh business always had to face competition from LocustWorld - something few expected to see achieved. But Wi-Next, an Italian invention, may have to be taken seriously, adding "any WiFi enabled device" to the list of computers which can be mesh nodes. And yes, that includes mobile phones.
The basic Wi-Next mesh node is a Linux device [illustrated above, left] which they expect to sell for around 70 Euros when it is "industrialised" in the next few months. It is powered by the Ethernet cable (PoE) and it works on most WiFi frequencies, said founder Nicola de Carne (pictured) at 3GSM today.
But they aren't satisfied with just producing a purpose built mesh node; they want to port their software to any machine. They say work is "in progress" for a version for Symbian, and another version for Windows - and Windows Mobile - will mean that they are on their way to make any machine with WiFi in it into a mesh node.
As with any WiFi mesh, the network creates itself, without requiring human intervention. Machines which are enabled with the software will link to each other, and pass messages around the mesh net - rerouting as new machines appear in the mesh, or disappear.
The idea that a phone can be a useful Mesh node will raise eyebrows. Jon Anderson, inventor of the LocustWorld Mesh, has often suggested that any processor less powerful than an Intel x86 chip would struggle to do all the things that LocustWorld software asks it to do.
There are several rival providers of mesh devices, from Tropos to Strix, but the field has been thrown into excited confusion by the recent announcement by Belair that it has been awarded a patent for its technology.
A report in Unstrung says that the company "has been issued a key U.S. patent for its innovative, carrier-grade wireless mesh backhaul technologies already deployed in over 250 networks worldwide." The patent discloses innovative technology for providing true carrier-grade, mobile broadband multi-service mesh networks, says the brief report.
Wi-Next technology was developed originally for emergency communications in a natural disaster area, or war zone. An Italian Government sponsorship gave the researchers in Turin Polytechnic the finance needed to develop it into a home networking system.
3GSM - how to set up a large WLAN - not!
[my experience has been that IEEE/IETF/3GPP/3GPP2 wifi networks seem to be well sorted out, e.g. conferences with smaller attendance - free range tradeshows like 3GSM and CTIA, along with others tend to be 802.11 chaos... -- sfx]
by Guy J Kewney | posted on 13 February 2007
http://www.newswireless.net/index.cfm/article/3208
It is going to be a complaint from many at this year´s Barcelona thrash - that people could not get online wirelessly. Is it a plot by the GSM association to make 3G broadband look good?
Last year´s congress was remarkable for cramped press facilities. OK, not as cramped as the facilities we used to have in Cannes, but nonetheless, cramped - and given how much bigger Barcelona Fira grounds are, we expected better this year.
No such luck, sadly. Exactly the same number of seats for nearly twice the number of registered Press.
But worse was the attempt to provide Internet access. If you could get one of the available desks in the press centre, you could plug into one of the available Ethernet cables (again, not enough!) but if not, you had to log into the wireless LAN.
That worked, if ´worked´ is a variable with a very small range of very low numbers. Web pages took several minutes to load, and usually timed out. Any attempt to get into content management software, was doomed.
Being resourceful, stringers resorted to Google. Google´s Gmail service is unusual in Web mail services in being fail-safe, and quite ´thin´ on the user machine. That means: it saves what you write as a draft, and it loads quickly.
If, as seems inevitable here, you get disconnected half way through writing your story, you can be pretty sure that most of what you already wrote will be still there when you manage to log in again.
Qualcomm: There will be no Nokia truce
Litigation could be the only way forward
http://networks.silicon.com/mobile/0,39024665,39165767,00.htm
By Jo Best
Published: Tuesday 13 February 2007
Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs has revealed today that he believes there will be no legal ceasefire between the company and Nokia in an ongoing legal battle over licensing between the two.
Qualcomm filed suit against the Finnish phone maker in both UK and US courts last year, alleging patent infringement, after negotiations between the two failed to agree a new licensing agreement for a deal set to expire this April.
Jacobs told delegates at this year's 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona that he believes there will be no settlement without the intervention of other parties.
He said: "The negotiating teams are fairly far apart. It is my personal view it will take some external intervention to get some movement."
Should Nokia refuse to sign the deal, the financial impact could be four to six cents on its expected profits per share during the 2007 fiscal year according to a recent results call.
More legal action may yet be on the cards. Jacobs said: "If they continue to use our intellectual property and aren't paying for it, we will take whatever steps necessary to protect our rights."
As well as legal action on both sides of the Atlantic, Qualcomm has taken its case to the International Trade Commission and is seeking an injunction banning Nokia from importing phones into the US.
After boom years, wireless industry faces slowing growth
[no comment - other that subscriber adds are going to slow, but replacement handsets - both from 2G to 3G as well as feature upgrades are the path to the future - some folks elect to remain unplugged from the network -- sfx]
W. David Gardner
(02/12/2007 5:20 PM EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197005742
The vendors and participants at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, this week may be unveiling a wide range of new mobile phone-based products and services, but their biggest challenge isn't the competition -- it's the fact that wireless growth is poised to slow dramatically.
Market research firm iSuppli said that even the latest smartphones aimed at developed markets and ultrainexpensive phones aimed at the Third World and developing nations won't halt the decline in subscriber growth and the growth of phone sales.
"The slowdown in new subscriber growth and the deceleration in mobile-phone sales translates directly into deteriorating market conditions for wireless carriers," said Dr. Jagdish Rebello, iSuppli's director and principal analyst, in a statement.
The market research firm predicted that global mobile phone subscriber growth will decelerate to 12.8% in 2007, from average growth rates of 25% in 2004, 2005, and 2006. The decline is expected to continue in subsequent years, dropping to 9.6% in 2008, 7% in 2009, and 5.7% in 2010.
As expected, the manufacture and sales of mobile phones is likely to track subscriber growth, according to the iSuppli report, which was announced to coincide with the Barcelona event. The firm forecast a mobile phone production growth rate of 9.1%, down from the average growth rate of 19.3% for the preceding three years. Production rates are expected to continue to decline to 6.9% in 2008, 4.8% in 2009, and 3% in 2010.
"Carriers and their mobile phone suppliers need new strategies to counter the impact of this phenomenon," said Rebello.
To stimulate growth, iSuppli suggests that wireless carriers provide a new range of advanced services like Web access and music and TV playback for users in advanced industrialized nations. The market research firm suggests that ultralow-cost handsets can stimulate growth in Latin America, China, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, and India.
"For India and other developing regions, the next phase of growth will be driven by low-end phones," said Rebello, who noted that India in particular could enjoy rapid handset growth. Cell phone penetration in India is just 13.5% in 2007, iSuppli said, while the predicted penetration will rise to 31.5% in India in 2010.
PHS growth stalls in China; decline expected in 2008
[A couple of points here - one) what is going to replace it, and two) I guess this would be a reduced revenue opportunity for our 2G TDMA based friends that collect royalties from it -- sfx]
http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197005922&cid=RSSfeed_eetimes_newsRSS
Mike Clendenin
EE Times
(02/13/2007 10:02 PM EST)
SHANGHAI — After sizzling growth in the first half of the decade, the go-go days of China's PHS market are over, with a contraction expected in 2008 or 2009.
The PHS market grew by 6.2 percent last year, for a total base of 92.7 million users, according to government figures. That's a noticeable decline from the year before, when the market grew 23 percent, and in previous years when the market doubled or tripled in size.
The slow down occurred as operators turned their attention to laying a foundation for 3G services, expected to roll out this year or in early 2008. That's unwelcome news for the handful of chipmakers that recently started shipping PHS chips, such as Airoha Technology, Comlent Inc and RDA Microelectronics. Firms that moved in earlier, such as Atheros Communications, have fared better, but still face increasing competition among the decline.
Opinions are mixed among executives regarding whether this year will see a dramatic decline, in part because uncertainty over the introduction of 3G services could help sustain moderate investment and promotion in PHS.
No one doubts, however, that the days of double- and triple-digit growth are ancient history. Analysts estimate the PHS market will start shrinking in 2008 or 2009. What may help cushion chipmakers looking to wring out some profit is the likelihood that the replacement market will still be viable for at least few years.
Also known as Personal Handyphone System, PHS is a legacy technology that's found a second life in China because its lower calling fees make for a light monthly bill.
Developed by NTT and introduced in Japan in 1995, PHS moved to China in 1998 under UTStarcom's leadership as the Personal Access System (PAS). That turned PHS from a distinct, separate, widely deployed network into a wireline extension — essentially a glorified cordless phone. In this scheme, a picostation can be placed atop any copper line — anywhere — to encompass a small radius of typically 4 km per station. The picocell structure extends battery life beyond that of wider-area cellular networks.
HSPA vs. WiMAX - study says WiMAX will be a "niche technology"
[comments - if you have UMTS spectrum, why worry about wimax, LTE has more opportunity. If you're a cdma2000 operator, UMB is also an alternative. IF YOUR A CABLE OPERATOR, or a non-wireless TELCOM player, then WIMAX makes sense for last mile. -- I've got more thoughts on wimax, I'll post them later -- sfx]
http://www.mobiletechnews.com/info/2007/02/08/171816.html
Posted: 08-Feb-2007 [Source: Arthur D. LIttle]
[A new study by Arthur D. Little says "HSPA will account for most mobile broadband deployments while mobile WiMax may capture niche markets."]
London -- With over 93 commercial networks in operation, HSPA is likely to account for the majority of investment in global mobile broadband networks over the next five years, finds a new study by Arthur D. Little. By comparison mobile WiMax will be a niche technology within the overall global mobile broadband wireless access market, likely to account for at most 15% of this network equipment market and perhaps 10% of mobile broadband wireless subscribers by. In its latest report, "HSPA and mobile WiMax for mobile broadband" Arthur D. Little unveils a non-partisan view of both leading technologies to present an articulate guideline for operators, regulators and vendors, who are investing for the future amid a cloud of hype.
In this wide reaching study, Arthur D. Little consultants from its U.S. and European offices interviewed 31 HSPA and WiMax equipment vendors, operators running the networks, government regulators and financial investors around the globe. They also collaborated with Altran Telecoms & Media and Praxis HIS to collect some 300 parameters required for a quantitative assessment of the differences and modelled these in realistic deployment scenarios.
HSDPA (including HSUPA and HSPA+) is taking the lead as it is a natural migration path for a large number of GSM and UMTS operators already operating commercial networks in 3G spectrum. This will give rise to significant economies of scale on handsets and user devices and a large ecosystem of global suppliers of components, subsystems, equipment and network design and implementation services. Hence this is the least risky and best understood route to offering broadband mobile services which can offer speeds comparable to first generation fixed DSL services.
Commenting on the findings Michael Natusch, head of Arthur D. Little's UK TIME (Telecoms, IT, Media and Electronics) practice, said: "The momentum in HSDPA deployments has been stimulated by competition from other broadband wireless technologies and by the prospect of competition from mobile WiMax. However, there is as yet no convincing real-world evidence of the actual relative performances of these technologies in large scale deployments. Nevertheless, it is likely that these two technologies will achieve comparable levels of performance in typical real-world situations, contrary to the notion that mobile WiMax should be regarded as a "Killer" technology.
The results of Arthur D. Little's modeling work shows that WiMax systems are expected to achieve significantly greater theoretical peak data transfer rates when deployed than today's commercial HSPA networks deliver now, such as theoretical speeds of e.g. 16.8 Mbps in urban areas vs 2-3 Mbps for HSPA. However, the coverage a WiMax base station can achieve, is substantially lower than HSPA, hence HSPA operators will be able to deploy a smaller number of base stations and sites to cover the same geography. Indications are that radio access network capex for current WiMax technology can significantly exceed HSDPA capex.
Another consequence of this characteristic of these two technologies is that an HSPA operator will be able to match its growing investment more clearly to the development of demand than mobile WiMax operators who will have to install more cell sites at the beginning to ensure coverage.
Arthur D. Little acknowledges that in the longer term, well into the second decade of this century, mobile broadband wireless systems will be characterized by technologies such as OFDMA and MIMO. Development of these technologies is being pursued by the 3G/HSPA ecosystem within the framework of 3G LTE as well as by WiMax. The long term future relative roles of 3G LTE and mobile WiMax, both of which face major development hurdles before they achieve the full promise of new, so-called 4G systems, is uncertain and will be influenced by continuing expected shifts in the priorities and competitive alignments of major players in the wireless industry which has undergone a number of consolidations in recent months.
In contrast to many other reports on HSPA, mobile WiMax and other broadband wireless technologies, the Arthur D. Little study highlights and assesses all the factors - strategic, competitive, commercial, regulatory and political as well as technological that influence operators' choices of wireless network technology.
Evidence for the potential complementary nature of HSPA and WiMax can be seen in the increased interest in multi-mode user devices and roaming capabilities across the technologies. This development, which reflects the widespread anticipation of the central role of OFDMA and other technologies involved in WiMax and 3G LTE in all eventual future broadband wireless networks, is a welcome change from the provocative and misleading headlines that have appeared over the past two years which imply that mobile WiMax threatens the viability of today's HSPA and related technologies.
The Telco Battle of Mice & Incumbents
http://gigaom.com/2007/02/04/the-telco-battle-of-mice-incumbents/
The saying goes that elephants are afraid of mice. Actually that is not true. It is elephant keepers who like to kill mice because they carry disease that can bring down the mighty beast. The story is also true of the telecom industry, where mice aka oddly named voice companies (Jajah, Rebtel, Fring, and Zing), MuniFi, FON, and Clearwire are the disease carriers, the disease that impacts the revenues of the mighty carriers. It is hardly a surprise that the elephant keepers - telecom CEOs worldwide - want to kill these mice.
Regardless of what is the final outcome, the swarm of these little creatures are utilizing the Internet to give the communicating public an alternative to sending checks to the incumbents. What they are doing is challenging the telcos’ share of the relatively fixed time people devote to communication. The telephone network functions more like a giant billing system than a communications platform, and by making people “bill less” on that platform, the mice hurt the elephant.
In the U.S., the Big Four - AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Comcast - would get away with their oligopoly unless the mice who represent the Disruptive Communications sector keep doing what they do. The consolidation in the phone business is a sign that they are having an impact.
Consolidation arises from an effort to resist change. Comcast uses a model introduced by Vonage to compete with Verizon for voice customers. Verizon reacts to the same development by deploying VoiceWing as an option for customers calling to discontinue service. These are uncomfortable times for the incumbents, because they now need to adapt and compete with the “mice” despite their size.
When faced with such odds the incumbents resort to using government and legislation as their competitive edge. Government fiat created the telcos. Influence with government remains the primary means of survival. The telcos push government to raise barriers to entry for disruptors (FCC mandates on VoIP companies regarding registration, E9112, Calea, and USF), clear obstacles to adjacent markets for themselves (national or state video franchise rules), and facilitate price increases on captive customers (eliminating UNE-P3).
Yet, the “mice” keep breeding and coming back. The availability of faster cheaper hardware and software improvements make instant messaging, email, web based communication, and the many flavors of VoIP increasingly better alternatives to plain old telephone service. Consolidation does not change the fact people find fewer and fewer reasons to create a billable event by picking up a telephone. As long as one of them hits the jackpot like Skype did, there will always be funding available to nibble away at the revenues.
You know what they say - there is no mice-free elephant stable.
KDDI hit by computer glitch due to surge in cell phone contract orders
KDDI Corp. was forced to stop accepting mobile phone orders because of a computer glitch caused by a surge in calls on Sunday, company officials said.
After new regulations allow customers to maintain the same phone number even if they change operators, KDDI's au brand has been receiving a large number of orders.
KDDI officials said that au's service computer that handles the orders slowed down at about 4 p.m. on Sunday, and stopped receiving orders. It began receiving orders at about 4:40 p.m., but again stopped at about 5 p.m. because of the computer glitch.
The company plans to receive orders as usual on Monday.
Since the new phone number rule, NTT DoCoMo has lost some 238,000 customers, while SoftBank lost 78,000 users by the end of November. KDDI's customers have increased by some 316,000. (Mainichi)
Who will be winners in China's 3G industry?
http://english.people.com.cn/200612/17/eng20061217_333352.html
As China is expected to launch the third generation mobile communication (3G) soon, its 3G-related stocks have kept rising in recent days. Experts warned that investors should be cautious and get clear who are the real winners of China's 3G industry.
At the ITU (International Telecom Union) Telecom World 2006 held recently in Hong Kong, positive remarks by operators and equipment makers and an array of new products strengthened investors' confidence in China's 3G-related companies and pushed them to buy 3G stocks in the hope of making profits.
Yi Minyu, director of telecom consulting section under the China Center for Information Industry Development, analyzed that though 3G network has obvious advantages compared with traditional 2G networks of GSM and CDMA, not all the companies in the 3G industrial chain would gain lucrative profits.
MOBILE EQUIPMENT MAKERS: BIGGEST WINNERS IN SHORT PERIOD
A complete 3G industrial chain includes operators, network equipment providers, terminal manufacturers and distributors, value-added service providers, among others.
"The first direct beneficiaries of 3G are mobile equipment and system providers," said Yi.
For telecom operators, 3G license means large sum of investment. Yi estimated that the total investment of the first phase of 3G network construction in China will be more than 100 billion yuan (12.78 billion U.S. dollars), which would turn into revenues of equipment and system providers.
For the last couple of years, telecom operators in China have not embarked on any large scale network expansion projects, to the dismay of domestic and foreign equipment makers. China's delay in issuing 3G license made the 3G equipment giants even more anxious.
"They have been lobbying hard for 3G and kept saying that China has lagged behind in mobile communications," said Yi.
The expert pointed out that such phenomenon is only typical of China. In other countries, telecom operators may not start network construction immediately when gaining 3G license unless they are sure of the profits.
TERMINAL MAKERS WILL NOT MAKE IDEAL PROFITS FROM 3G SOON
Yi held that compared with equipment providers, 3G terminal manufacturers and distributors would face more risks in the market.
He analyzed that 3G terminal manufacturing and sales will be based on business development of 3G operators, so they have little power to control the market.
The glooming prospect for 3G business will make it hard for them to realize the dream of making money in the 3G market.
Compared with 2.5 G, 3G is merely a gradual change and can not bring any revolutionary rise in business, said Yi.
TELECOM OPERATORS: SOME GAIN AND SOME LOSE
The 3G market is very complicated for telecom operators. According to Yi, fixed line operators would benefit from the new generation of mobile network if they are lucky enough to gain 3G licenses, as the growth of fixed line business has slowed down.
China Unicom, which is operating a CDMA network, will not face much pressures as it is relatively easier for the company to upgrade from the present network to CDMA2000, an international 3G standard.
China Mobile would face more risks as it is expected to adopt home-grown TD-SCDMA, which would require huge investment on the networks, said Yi, adding the prospect for TD-SCDMA is still vague.
According to the analyst, voice business will remain the major source of revenue for network operators even in the age of 3G, which has been proved by experiences of other nations. And all the 3G applications actually could be realized on 2.5 G hand phones up to date.
Data application, which is expected to be the new growth point of operators in the 3G age, did not bring corresponding benefits except occupying large amount of network capacity, said Yi.
Shanghai Unicom's CDMA 1X network, an upgraded version of CDMA, spent 75 percent of its capacity on data business which only made seven percent of the company's total telecom revenue.
"The same problem will linger in the case 3G," said Yi.
International experiences also makes people doubt the future of the market. Most of the 3G networks in Europe could only realize one sixth of the ideal transmission speed which has made telecom operators around the world cautious about 3G.
Source: Xinhua
EV-DO vs WCDMA: Who’s ahead?
Om Malik on Broadband
http://gigaom.com/2006/11/19/ev-do-vs-wcdma-who%e2%80%99s-ahead/
By Chetan Sharma
It’s been an evolving year for wireless broadband in the US. It moved from test-beds to real markets nationwide; both EV-DO and WCDMA (and their respective upgrades) have made progress. Considering that there are three critical things that matter in the evolution cycle of any wireless technology — the network coverage, the device choices, and the overall cost to the consumer — which technology is likely to be more pervasive in the coming years?
In terms of network coverage, even though Cingular (then AT&T Wireless) got a head start with its ceremonial UMTS deployment in four markets, Verizon and Sprint Nextel have jumped much further ahead in terms of national coverage. While Cingular has only covered 52 major markets in 28 states (just over 50% market) thus far, both Verizon and Sprint are nearing complete nation-wide coverage. T-Mobile won’t get into the picture until well into 2007. Alltel, the number 5 carrier in the US has been spreading its EV-DO coverage as well.
In the critical area of handsets, EV-DO is ahead by a mile. As of Sept 2006, there were 15 3G handsets available in the market (representing approximately 20% of the available handsets from big four), Fourteen of those handsets were for EV-DO (10 from Verizon, 4 from Sprint Nextel) vs. five UMTS/HSDPA handsets from Cingular.
The average price of a 3G handsets in the U.S. is approximately $140 for low-end phones and $250 on the high-end. The pricing for broadband-friendly services are still in a state of flux but becoming more attractive by the day. To Cingular’s credit, its LG CU 500 is available at sub-$100 to make it attractive for mass-market. However, device price is pretty much the only area where Cingular wins out. The carrier needs better market coverage and a broader range of devices before it can start catching up with its CDMA buddies. Starting this Christmas season, we should expect the gap between the two technologies start to narrow as Cingular plays catch-up.
As of 2Q06, CDMA carriers had 93% of the 3G subscribers in the US with Verizon leading the pack with over 80% of the 3G subscribers. Next year we will see the introduction of HSDPA/HSUPA and the evolution is expected to continue with HSPA and LTE by 2009. On the CDMA track, Sprint Nextel and Verizon are already testing and introducing Rev A devices. EV-DO Rev B and Rev C are likely to be introduced in 2008 and 2009 respectively.
So, what can we expect in the next few years? In a way, this match of EV-DO vs. HSDPA in the US is akin to GSM vs. CDMA tussle 5-6 years ago. By the time, AT&T Wireless finally decided to abandon TDMA in favor of the GSM evolution, CDMA 1x RTT was well ahead of the game. EV-DO is clearly ahead in its 5 year maturation cycle in the US and will continue to enjoy a dominant market-share till at least 2010 (though WCDMA will completely dominate EV-DO worldwide). By that time, 3G penetration will reach over 50%.
Chetan Sharma is principal with wireless consulting firm, Chetan Sharma Consulting
High-Speed Wireless Dreams
Technology November 6, 2006, 12:50AM EST
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2006/tc20061106_875720.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily
HSDPA may finally deliver a small piece of wireless utopia. We tear down a PC card that can help make it happen
by Arik Hesseldahl
Just when it seemed that the overused wireless catchphrase "3G" might finally fade from memory, new technologies are starting to emerge and stake their own claim to the post-3G zeitgeist. For years 3G, or "third generation," denoted some future wireless utopia where voice, data, and video would all merge into a wondrous amalgam, marked by snazzy phones that do everything perfectly—and fast.
But there's a new wireless utopia, and again, it's about merging voice, data, and all the other stuff at even faster speeds. One of them is known as High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, or HSDPA, and it has started appearing on wireless networks operated by companies such as Vodaphone (VOD) in Europe and Cingular Wireless (a joint venture of AT&T (T) and BellSouth (BLS)) in the U.S. Meanwhile, South Korea's Samsung has started building HSDPA-ready phones.
PC Cards
The technology promises wireless speeds as high as 3.6 Mbps but in practice will be much slower than that—fast enough, though, to make wirelessly surfing the Web and downloading music and video worth the effort. That will make it ideal for wireless Internet access on a PC, and manufacturers have started to release PC cards for just that purpose. There are already scores on the market.
Market research firm iSuppli recently took apart one of those cards, the E620, manufactured by Chinese electronics giant Huawei and found that in addition to running fast, it doesn't cost all that much to make. Vodaphone sells the E620 card in Britain for a price equivalent to about $272. The components inside the card cost about $73, while manufacturing costs amount to about $6 per unit, says iSuppli analyst Andrew Rassweiler.
Chips Ahoy
And while Huawei is certainly making a decent profit given its costs, the big winner in the HSDPA business appears to be wireless chipmaker Qualcomm (QCOM). Of the $73 in component costs inside the card, more than $40 worth of chips come from Qualcomm, Rassweiler says. "We've been looking inside other cards and some handsets that are HSDPA-ready from LG Electronics and Samsung, and we're seeing the very same Qualcomm chips every time," he says. The same set of Qualcomm chips appear in Samsung's SGH-Z520 and LG's Chocolate KU-800, the second version of LG's music-playing phone (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/5/06, "Easy Listening on LG's Chocolate").
"Qualcomm for years has had the CDMA side of the wireless business sewn up for itself," Rassweiler says. "Now it's looking like with HSDPA, its influence on the wireless industry could increase." Other companies building HSDPA chips include Texas Instruments (TXN) and Broadcom (BRCM). Motorola (MOT), Siemens (SI), and Sierra Wireless (SWIR) are all building HSDPA cards.
Other chips inside the card include Flash memory from Samsung, a USB controller from NEC (NIPNY), and power controller chips from Anadigics (ANAD) and AVX (AVX).
ISuppli has forecast shipments of 917,000 HSDPA devices this year, and expects shipments to increase to 87 million units a year by 2010.
Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.
The Incredibly Shrinking Telecom Industry...
Thought this might be of interest to some...
Relevant links...
http://broadband.gigaom.com/2006/10/05/incredibly-shrinking-telecom-industry/
http://www.dslprime.com/
sfx
----------------------
It is raining outside in San Francisco. It is cold and miserable and New York Yankees could not hit their way out of a loss. I am feeling a bit down, and gloomy. This bit in Dave Burstein’s newsletter2 is getting me down even more. How many more friends will be in trouble? When will it stop?
100,000 will soon be fired in the industry, including well over 30,000 at Deutsche Telecom and tens of thousands more at Alcatel Lucent, Nokia Siemens, and AT&T BellSouth. Many of those fired, especially older folk, will never find a decent job again. Klaus Kleinfeld and other Siemens executives are giving up 5 million euros in pay increases to enhance the fund for fired ex-Siemens workers at BenQ, after a massive public outcry led by German clergy. Few other CEOs are likely to follow that example.
Broadcom is well known for enriching the coffers of opposing attorneys...
we shall see how this works out.
sfx
Cingular Lights Up 3G Around Northern Cal
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher- Posted today at 4:24 PM
http://mobile.gigaom.com/2006/09/20/cingular-hsdpa/
It’s not too big of a surprise that various wireless providers would focus on building out high speed wireless broadband options throughout Northern California. Whether its 3G, muni WiFi or even one day WiMAX, early adopter dominated regions like Silicon Valley and the Bay Area (that includes San Francisco) are pretty obvious candidates. But so are less high profile cities in and around Central Valley and beyond.
Cingular, the largest wireless carrier in the US, says in the next few weeks it will publicly announce that its 3G (HSDPA) network is available in cities in Northern California like Stockton, Fresno, Modesto, Sacramento and Vallejo. The company says the service has been available in San Francisco and San Jose since December 2005, but we haven’t heard of too many people using it.
Cingular spokesperson Ritch Blasi says the networks in Stockton and Fresno were already turned on earlier this month. The speeds are supposed to get between 400 kbps to 700 kbps. (Anyone in those areas want to test it out and report back?)
Cingular is pushing to offer 3G in cities across Northern California, but there are other wireless broadband options moving in. Sacramento is looking at a muni WiFi option, as is San Francisco. San Jose, Mountain View, and the entire Silicon Valley region has WiFi plans. While Mountain View’s GoogleFi is already up and running, most of these networks won’t be live for some time, so that gives even slow-moving Cingular ample time to sign up 3G subscribers. Will you sign up?
============
Katie Fehrenbacher is a staff writer for GigaOM. She used to be a reporter for Red Herring. She reports on wireless and wireless broadband technologies, companies, and startups.
The Phenomenon Called Indian Mobile Market Growth
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/09/17/122336.php
The Indian mobile market is on a high growth trajectory. I was in two different Indian cities last week – part of my five day-five city tour across Asia. While in India, I was told by my colleagues that the mobile telephone network connectivity has become so bad that connections are dropping often.
I was in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur for a day and during a discussion with friends, a Malaysian expert told me that the prospects of two major Malaysian telecom operators look good owing to their investments in India.
I was in a lunch meeting with a senior executive of a major Southeast airline the week before in Singapore - the most talked about topic over lunch was the advent of Indian aviation players creating ripples in the market. I was floored by the experience flying Jet Airways during the Chennai to Kuala Lumpur flight. My colleagues ask me to hold judgement till I get to fly Kingfisher. I am not someone to be impressed so easily -- my frequent flyer statement shows several hundred thousand miles with none other than Singapore Airlines. It is very likely aviation shall do an impressive repeat of the success of the mobile industry.
Let's look at the telecom scene: Southeast Asian telecom operators have made significant investments in Indian mobile service players. These players took a financial stake in established growing businesses. Maxis, Malaysia’s largest telecom player has invested in Aircel, and Singtel has invested in Bharti, the largest mobile player in India. As these players slug it out, Maxis reports that Aircel added 588,000 new subscribers during the second quarter alone, which is more than double Maxis' achievement in Malaysia. The other Malaysian player, Telekom Malaysia, is investing in the third Indian Indian player – Spice communications. All the three are aggressively expanding their Indian opoerations.
Monthy subscriptions inching towards six million additions per month - 5.9 million of them - are new mobile subscriptions, making India’s net addition the highest in the world, overtaking that of China – though the penetration levels may be lower. This New York Times article shows that china added 5.1 million subscribers, so the Indian run rate is 15% ahead of that of china.
Look at the growth -- around 125 million subscribers have signed for mobile services in less than 15 years since the services were launched in the country. India believes that six or seven million monthy new subscriber additions are possible. Clearly liberalization and foreign investments all are helping the country in a big way -- after all, the Indian mobile subscription rates are amongst the lowest in the world and handset makers like Nokia are helping the cause by coming in with low cost models and in the process helping India create high tech manufacturing clusters in places like Sriperumpudur, India’s likely answer to Shenzhen.
Three types of operators are alreasy investing here: the OEMs like Nokia, Motorola, the EMSs like Flextronics and Foxconn, and the component manufacturers who work with the OEM and EMS players. Dell is the recent addition planning to set up a manufacturing shop there. It's the most talked about thing in the tech sector today -- some of the largest telecom-related opportunties for system integrators/service players are available in India.
Clearly opening up of the economy and the progress of the technology world is helping India advance faster and better -- the only eyesore is the Indian infrastructure. I do not want to write about my experience in the Bangalore airport clearing baggage or the time that it took for me to clear immigration on my return via Chennai.
S. Sadagopan, heads consulting and eBusiness for Satyam in the Asia Pacific, Middle Eastern and African markets based out of Singapore. He has led several consulting and technology transformation engagements covering multiple industries cutting across a wide variety of technologies around the world. His blog is focused on emerging technologies & trends. These are his personal views and he can be reached at sadagopan@gmail.com.
OT - An Age of Constant Conflict
Once in a while I share interesting essays, this is one of those times.
sfx
----------
We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent. There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.
We have entered an age of constant conflict. Information is at once our core commodity and the most destabilizing factor of our time. Until now, history has been a quest to acquire information; today, the challenge lies in managing information. Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize, and apply relevant knowledge soar–professionally, financially, politically, militarily, and socially. We, the winners, are a minority.
For the world masses, devastated by information they cannot manage or effectively interpret, life is “nasty, brutish . . . and short-circuited.” The general pace of change is overwhelming, and information is both the motor and signifier of change. Those humans, in every country and region, who cannot understand the new world, or who cannot profit from its uncertainties, or who cannot reconcile themselves to its dynamics, will become the violent enemies of their inadequate governments, of their more fortunate neighbors, and ultimately of the United States. We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent.
We live in an age of multiple truths. He who warns of the “clash of civilizations” is incontestably right; simultaneously, we shall see higher levels of constructive trafficking between civilizations than ever before. The future is bright–and it is also very dark. More men and women will enjoy health and prosperity than ever before, yet more will live in poverty or tumult, if only because of the ferocity of demographics. There will be more democracy–that deft liberal form of imperialism–and greater popular refusal of democracy. One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.
In the past, information empowerment was largely a matter of insider and outsider, as elementary as the division of society into the literate and illiterate. While superior information–often embodied in military technology–killed throughout history, its effects tended to be politically decisive but not personally intrusive (once the raping and pillaging were done). Technology was more apt to batter down the city gates than to change the nature of the city. The rise of the modern West broke the pattern. Whether speaking of the dispossessions and dislocations caused in Europe through the introduction of machine-driven production or elsewhere by the great age of European imperialism, an explosion of disorienting information intruded ever further into Braudel’s “structures of everyday life.” Historically, ignorance was bliss. Today, ignorance is no longer possible, only error.
The contemporary expansion of available information is immeasurable, uncontainable, and destructive to individuals and entire cultures unable to master it. The radical fundamentalists–the bomber in Jerusalem or Oklahoma City, the moral terrorist on the right or the dictatorial multiculturalist on the left–are all brothers and sisters, all threatened by change, terrified of the future, and alienated by information they cannot reconcile with their lives or ambitions. They ache to return to a golden age that never existed, or to create a paradise of their own restrictive design. They no longer understand the world, and their fear is volatile.
Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure (of note, the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community). The attempt of the Iranian mullahs to secede from modernity has failed, although a turbaned corpse still stumbles about the neighborhood. Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its children. Our victims volunteer.
These noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or the rejectionist segment of our own population, are enraged. Their cultures are under assault; their cherished values have proven dysfunctional, and the successful move on without them. The laid-off blue-collar worker in America and the Taliban militiaman in Afghanistan are brothers in suffering.
It is a truism that throughout much of the 20th century the income gap between top and bottom narrowed, whether we speak of individuals, countries, or in some cases continents. Further, individuals or countries could “make it” on sheer muscle power and the will to apply it. You could work harder than your neighbor and win in the marketplace. There was a rough justice in it, and it offered near-ecumenical hope. That model is dead. Today, there is a growing excess of muscle power in an age of labor-saving machines and methods. In our own country, we have seen blue-collar unions move from center stage to near-irrelevance. The trend will not reverse. At the same time, expectations have increased dramatically. There is a global sense of promises broken, of lies told. Individuals on much of the planet believe they have played by the rules laid down for them (in the breech, they often have not), only to find that some indefinite power has changed those rules overnight. The American who graduated from high school in the 1960s expected a good job that would allow his family security and reasonably increasing prosperity. For many such Americans, the world has collapsed, even as the media tease them with images of an ever-richer, brighter, fun world from which they are excluded. These discarded citizens sense that their government is no longer about them, but only about the privileged. Some seek the solace of explicit religion. Most remain law-abiding, hard-working citizens. Some do not.
The foreign twin is the Islamic, or sub-Saharan African, or Mexican university graduate who faces a teetering government, joblessness, exclusion from the profits of the corruption distorting his society, marriage in poverty or the impossibility of marriage, and a deluge of information telling him (exaggeratedly and dishonestly) how well the West lives. In this age of television-series franchising, videos, and satellite dishes, this young, embittered male gets his skewed view of us from reruns of Dynasty and Dallas, or from satellite links beaming down Baywatch, sources we dismiss too quickly as laughable and unworthy of serious consideration as factors influencing world affairs. But their effect is destructive beyond the power of words to describe. Hollywood goes where Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable to touch the reality of America, is touched by America’s irresponsible fantasies of itself; he sees a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world from which he is excluded, a world of wealth he can judge only in terms of his own poverty.
Most citizens of the globe are not economists; they perceive wealth as inelastic, its possession a zero-sum game. If decadent America (as seen on the screen) is so fabulously rich, it can only be because America has looted one’s own impoverished group or country or region. Adding to the cognitive dissonance, the discarded foreigner cannot square the perceived moral corruption of America, a travesty of all he has been told to value, with America’s enduring punitive power. How could a nation whose women are “all harlots” stage Desert Storm? It is an offense to God, and there must be a demonic answer, a substance of conspiracies and oppression in which his own secular, disappointing elite is complicit. This discarded foreigner’s desire may be to attack the “Great Satan America,” but America is far away (for now), so he acts violently in his own neighborhood. He will accept no personal guilt for his failure, nor can he bear the possibility that his culture “doesn’t work.” The blame lies ever elsewhere. The cult of victimization is becoming a universal phenomenon, and it is a source of dynamic hatreds.
It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry “American culture,” with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites–figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians–human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people’s culture. It stresses comfort and convenience–ease–and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx’s dream, and his nightmare.
Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can’t wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather “Baywatch.” America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no “peer competitor” in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted–men and women everywhere–clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.
American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its “disposable” products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection. American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works are transient, then so are life’s greatest gifts–passion, beauty, the quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself. American culture is alive.
This vividness, this vitality, is reflected in our military; we do not expect to achieve ultimate solutions, only constant improvement. All previous cultures, general and military, have sought to achieve an ideal form of life and then fix it in cement. Americans, in and out of uniform, have always embraced change (though many individuals have not, and their conservatism has acted as a healthy brake on our national excesses). American culture is the culture of the unafraid.
Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than exclude. The films most despised by the intellectual elite–those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex–are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere. American action films, often in dreadful copies, are available from the Upper Amazon to Mandalay. They are even more popular than our music, because they are easier to understand. The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a basic understanding. They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad). They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended or won–and violence and sex. Complain until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.
When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video images is more immediate and intense than that of computers. Image trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine. When we and they collide, they shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win.
As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by information, or dispossessed by the effects of information-based technologies, there will be more violence. Information victims will often see no other resort. As work becomes more cerebral, those who fail to find a place will respond by rejecting reason. We will see countries and continents divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic trends. Developing countries will not be able to depend on physical production industries, because there will always be another country willing to work cheaper. The have-nots will hate and strive to attack the haves. And we in the United States will continue to be perceived as the ultimate haves. States will struggle for advantage or revenge as their societies boil. Beyond traditional crime, terrorism will be the most common form of violence, but transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars will continue to plague the world, albeit with the “lesser” conflicts statistically dominant. In defense of its interests, its citizens, its allies, or its clients, the United States will be required to intervene in some of these contests. We will win militarily whenever we have the guts for it.
There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.
We are building an information-based military to do that killing. There will still be plenty of muscle power required, but much of our military art will consist in knowing more about the enemy than he knows about himself, manipulating data for effectiveness and efficiency, and denying similar advantages to our opponents. This will involve a good bit of technology, but the relevant systems will not be the budget vampires, such as manned bombers and attack submarines, that we continue to buy through inertia, emotional attachment, and the lobbying power of the defense industry. Our most important technologies will be those that support soldiers and Marines on the ground, that facilitate command decisions, and that enable us to kill accurately and survive amid clutter (such as multidimensional urban battlefields). The only imaginable use for most of our submarine fleet will be to strip out the weapons, dock them tight, and turn the boats into low-income housing. There will be no justification for billion-dollar bombers at all.
For a generation, and probably much longer, we will face no military peer competitor. Our enemies will challenge us by other means. The violent actors we encounter often will be small, hostile parties possessed of unexpected, incisive capabilities or simply of a stunning will to violence (or both). Renegade elites, not foreign fleets, should worry us. The urbanization of the global landscape is a greater threat to our operations than any extant or foreseeable military system. We will not deal with wars of Realpolitik, but with conflicts spawned of collective emotions, sub-state interests, and systemic collapse. Hatred, jealousy, and greed–emotions rather than strategy–will set the terms of the struggles.
We will survive and win any conflict short of a cataclysmic use of weapons of mass destruction. But the constant conflicts in which we selectively intervene will be as miserable as any other form of warfare for the soldiers and Marines engaged. The bayonet will still be relevant; however, informational superiority incisively employed should both sharpen that bayonet and permit us to defeat some–but never all–of our enemies outside of bayonet range. Our informational advantage over every other country and culture will be so enormous that our greatest battlefield challenge will be harnessing its power. Our potential national weakness will be the failure to maintain the moral and raw physical strength to thrust that bayonet into an enemy’s heart.
Pilots and skippers, as well as defense executives, demand threat models that portray country X or Y as overtaking the military capability of the United States in 10 to 20 years. Forget it. Our military power is culturally based. They cannot rival us without becoming us. Wise competitors will not even attempt to defeat us on our terms; rather, they will seek to shift the playing field away from military confrontations or turn to terrorism and nontraditional forms of assault on our national integrity. Only the foolish will fight fair.
The threat models stitched together from dead parts to convince Congress that the Russians are only taking a deep breath or that the Chinese are only a few miles off the coast of California uniformly assume that while foreign powers make all the right decisions, analyze every trend correctly, and continue to achieve higher and higher economic growth rates, the United States will take a nap. On the contrary. Beyond the Beltway, the United States is wide awake and leading a second “industrial” revolution that will make the original industrial revolution that climaxed the great age of imperialism look like a rehearsal by amateurs. Only the United States has the synthetic ability, the supportive laws, and the cultural agility to remain at the cutting edge of wealth creation.
Not long ago, the Russians were going to overtake us. Then it was oil-wealthy Arabs, then the Japanese. One prize-winning economist even calculated that fuddy-duddy Europe would dominate the next century (a sure prescription for boredom, were it true). Now the Chinese are our nemesis. No doubt our industrial-strength Cassandras will soon find a reason to fear the Galapagos. In the meantime, the average American can look forward to a longer life-span, a secure retirement, and free membership in the most triumphant culture in history. For the majority of our citizens, our vulgar, near-chaotic, marvelous culture is the greatest engine of positive change in history.
Freedom works.
In the military sphere, it will be impossible to rival or even approach the capabilities of our information-based force because it is so profoundly an outgrowth of our culture. Our information-based Army will employ many marvelous tools, but the core of the force will still be the soldier, not the machine, and our soldiers will have skills other cultures will be unable to replicate. Intelligence analysts, fleeing human complexity, like to project enemy capabilities based upon the systems a potential opponent might acquire. But buying or building stuff is not enough. It didn’t work for Saddam Hussein, and it won’t work for Beijing.
The complex human-machine interface developing in the US military will be impossible to duplicate abroad because no other state will be able to come from behind to equal the informational dexterity of our officers and soldiers. For all the complaints–in many respects justified–about our public school systems, the holistic and synergistic nature of education in our society and culture is imparting to tomorrow’s soldiers and Marines a second-nature grasp of technology and the ability to sort and assimilate vast amounts of competitive data that no other population will achieve. The informational dexterity of our average middle-class kid is terrifying to anyone born before 1970. Our computer kids function at a level foreign elites barely manage, and this has as much to do with television commercials, CD-ROMs, and grotesque video games as it does with the classroom. We are outgrowing our 19th-century model education system as surely as we have outgrown the manned bomber. In the meantime, our children are undergoing a process of Darwinian selection in coping with the information deluge that is drowning many of their parents. These kids are going to make mean techno-warriors. We just have to make sure they can do push-ups, too.
There is a useful German expression, “Die Lage war immer so ernst,” that translates very freely as “The sky has always been falling.” Despite our relish of fears and complaints, we live in the most powerful, robust culture on earth. Its discontinuities and contradictions are often its strengths. We are incapable of five-year plans, and it is a saving grace. Our fluidity, in consumption, technology, and on the battlefield, is a strength our nearest competitors cannot approach. We move very fast. At our military best, we become Nathan Bedford Forrest riding a microchip. But when we insist on buying into extended procurement contracts for unaffordable, neo-traditional weapon systems, we squander our brilliant flexibility. Today, we are locking-in already obsolescent defense purchases that will not begin to rise to the human capabilities of tomorrow’s service members. In 2015 and beyond, we will be receiving systems into our inventory that will be no more relevant than Sherman tanks and prop-driven bombers would be today. We are not providing for tomorrow’s military, we are paralyzing it. We will have the most humanly agile force on earth, and we are doing our best to shut it inside a technological straight-jacket.
There is no “big threat” out there. There’s none on the horizon, either. Instead of preparing for the Battle of Midway, we need to focus on the constant conflicts of richly varying description that will challenge us–and kill us–at home and abroad. There are plenty of threats, but the beloved dinosaurs are dead.
We will outcreate, outproduce and, when need be, outfight the rest of the world. We can out-think them, too. But our military must not embark upon the 21st century clinging to 20th-century models. Our national appetite for information and our sophistication in handling it will enable us to outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures, information-controlling societies, and rejectionist states. The skills necessary to this newest information age can be acquired only beginning in childhood and in complete immersion. Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage the free flow of information simply will not be competitive. They might master the technological wherewithal to watch the videos, but we will be writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties. Our creativity is devastating. If we insist on a “proven” approach to military affairs, we will be throwing away our greatest national advantage.
We need to make sure our information-based military is based on the right information.
Facing this environment of constant conflict amid information proliferation, the military response has been to coin a new catchphrase–information warfare–and then duck. Although there has been plenty of chatter about information warfare, most of it has been as helpful and incisive as a discussion of sex among junior high school boys; everybody wants to pose, but nobody has a clue. We have hemorrhaged defense dollars to contractors perfectly willing to tell us what we already knew. Studies study other studies. For now, we have decided that information warfare is a matter of technology, which is akin to believing that your stereo system is more important to music than the musicians.
Fear not. We are already masters of information warfare, and we shall get around to defining it eventually. Let the scholars fuss. When it comes to our technology (and all technology is military technology) the Russians can’t produce it, the Arabs can’t afford it, and no one can steal it fast enough to make a difference. Our great bogeyman, China, is achieving remarkable growth rates because the Chinese belatedly entered the industrial revolution with a billion-plus population. Without a culture-shattering reappreciation of the role of free information in a society, China will peak well below our level of achievement.
Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened identities–usually with marginal, if any, success–and yes, they are attempting to escape our influence. But American culture is infectious, a plague of pleasure, and you don’t have to die of it to be hindered or crippled in your integrity or competitiveness. The very struggle of other cultures to resist American cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of the future. We should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their peoples’ failure, while further increasing our relative strength.
It remains difficult, of course, for military leaders to conceive of warfare, informational or otherwise, in such broad terms. But Hollywood is “preparing the battlefield,” and burgers precede bullets. The flag follows trade. Despite our declaration of defeat in the face of battlefield victory in Mogadishu, the image of US power and the US military around the world is not only a deterrent, but a psychological warfare tool that is constantly at work in the minds of real or potential opponents. Saddam swaggered, but the image of the US military crippled the Iraqi army in the field, doing more to soften them up for our ground assault than did tossing bombs into the sand. Everybody is afraid of us. They really believe we can do all the stuff in the movies. If the Trojans “saw” Athena guiding the Greeks in battle, then the Iraqis saw Luke Skywalker precede McCaffrey’s tanks. Our unconscious alliance of culture with killing power is a combat multiplier no government, including our own, could design or afford. We are magic. And we’re going to keep it that way.
Within our formal military, we have been moving into information warfare for decades. Our attitude toward data acquisition and, especially, data dissemination within the force has broken with global military tradition, in which empowering information was reserved for the upper echelons. While our military is vertically responsible, as it must be, it is informationally democratic. Our ability to decentralize information and appropriate decisionmaking authority is a revolutionary breakthrough (the over-praised pre-1945 Germans decentralized some tactical decisionmaking, but only within carefully regulated guidelines–and they could not enable the process with sufficient information dissemination).
No military establishment has ever placed such trust in lieutenants, sergeants, and privates, nor are our touted future competitors likely to do so. In fact, there has been an even greater diffusion of power within our military (in the Army and Marines) than most of us realize. Pragmatic behavior daily subverts antiquated structures, such as divisions and traditional staffs. We keep the old names, but the behaviors are changing. What, other than its flag, does the division of 1997 have in common with the division of World War II? Even as traditionalists resist the reformation of the force, the “anarchy” of lieutenants is shaping the Army of tomorrow. Battalion commanders do not understand what their lieutenants are up to, and generals would not be able to sleep at night if they knew what the battalion commanders know. While we argue about change, the Army is changing itself. The Marines are doing a brilliant job of reinventing themselves while retaining their essence, and their achievement should be a welcome challenge to the Army. The Air Force and Navy remain rigidly hierarchical.
Culture is fate. Countries, clans, military services, and individual soldiers are products of their respective cultures, and they are either empowered or imprisoned. The majority of the world’s inhabitants are prisoners of their cultures, and they will rage against inadequacies they cannot admit, cannot bear, and cannot escape. The current chest-thumping of some Asian leaders about the degeneracy, weakness, and vulnerability of American culture is reminiscent of nothing so much as of the ranting of Japanese militarists on the eve of the Pacific War. I do not suggest that any of those Asian leaders intend to attack us, only that they are wrong. Liberty always looks like weakness to those who fear it.
In the wake of the Soviet collapse, some commentators declared that freedom had won and history was at an end. But freedom will always find enemies. The problem with freedom is that it’s just too damned free for tyrants, whether they be dictators, racial or religious supremacists, or abusive husbands. Freedom challenges existing orders, exposes bigotry, opens opportunity, and demands personal responsibility. What could be more threatening to traditional cultures? The advent of this new information age has opened a fresh chapter in the human struggle for, and with, freedom. It will be a bloody chapter, with plenty of computer-smashing and head-bashing. The number one priority of non-Western governments in the coming decades will be to find acceptable terms for the flow of information within their societies. They will uniformly err on the side of conservatism–informational corruption–and will cripple their competitiveness in doing so. Their failure is programmed.
The next century will indeed be American, but it will also be troubled. We will find ourselves in constant conflict, much of it violent. The United States Army is going to add a lot of battle streamers to its flag. We will wage information warfare, but we will fight with infantry. And we will always surprise those critics, domestic and foreign, who predict our decline.
Major (P) Ralph Peters is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he is responsible for future warfare. Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical level. He is a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College and holds a master’s degree in international relations. He has published widely on military and international concerns. His sixth novel, Twilight of Heroes, was recently released by Avon Books. This is his eighth article for Parameters. The author wishes to acknowledge the importance to this essay of discussions with Lieutenant Colonels Gordon Thompson and Lonnie Henley, both US Army officers.
Qualcomm Fighting Intel, The World
[saw this in my RSS feeds - thought it might be of interest -- sfx]
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher , August 24th, 2006
http://mobile.gigaom.com/2006/08/24/qualcomm-fighting-intel-the-world/
Reports are starting to pick up on the fact that Qualcomm, the San Diego-based wireless company that has thus far dominated the key cellular standards, is staring an uncertain future in the eye. It seemed like the company would make an easy sweep of the wireless world. As cellular networks transition to high speed 3G, Qualcomm will get a sizable cut of every 3G cell phone sold. But the company is starting to face a major backlash from an industry that seems to be trying to avoid the makings of a Microsoft-style monopoly in its midst.
A major crack in Qualcomm’s plans is Sprint’s recent announcement to spend up to $3 billion on wireless technology WiMAX, with additional support from Intel, Motorola and Samsung. WSJ points out how Intel is finally beginning to take on Qualcomm, and is finding some success.
Qualcomm points out (in the WSJ article) that it owns some WiMAX IP, most of it thanks to Flarion, a wireless broadband technology start-up it bought last year. Then there’s the numerous complaints against the company for monopolistic and aggressive business practices, as well as talks of carriers in developing markets slowing the transition to 3G or building competing GSM networks in part to avoid the Qualcomm royalty ecosystem.
Qualcomm’s response? Our competitors are ganging up on us. They are likely right, but that’s not necessarily a good place to be. While Qualcomm will no doubt make a lot of money from wireless for many years, with wireless companies like Intel, Nokia, and the like on the other side, they could very well lose out on that big Microsoft-style money the company has been aiming for. As the WSJ points out, their stock is down 30% since early May.
====
Katie Fehrenbacher is a staff writer for GigaOM. She used to be a reporter for Red Herring. She reports on wireless and wireless broadband technologies, companies, and startups.
Something to note...
sfx
------
http://www.rcrnews.com/news.cms?newsId=27163
Study: CDMA equipment sales lag while GSM gets boost
By Kristen Beckman
Aug 24, 2006
REDWOOD CITY, Calif.—The worldwide mobile infrastructure market grew 10 percent during the second quarter, but declined 3 percent compared with last year’s second quarter, according to a new study from market research firm Dell’Oro Group.
The company said weak sales of CDMA equipment impacted overall sales for the quarter. CDMA sales fell 26 percent from the second quarter last year, said Dell’Oro. However, the GSM market got a boost from increased spending in China, which offset weakness in North America and Latin America, said the company.
continued below
Click Here!
"As Chinese authorities continue to evaluate alternatives for 3G networks, continued subscriber growth has pushed service providers to renew their investment in their GSM-based networks," said Greg Collins, senior director of mobility infrastructure research at Dell’Oro.
CDMA cutbacks lead Nokia to lay off U.S. workers
I can say that the San Dieo folks over at the Nokia campus honestly made an earnest attempt to be successful - they were able to port BREW onto a non-QC chipset, along with Qualcomm in early days of IS95, they produced a competitive handset, and they did their very best...
the NOK San Diego campus was probably one of the better groups working on CDMA outside of Qualcomm in San Diego.
Sad to see that people are going to lose their jobs due to corporate politics.
sfx
(InfoWorld) - Nokia will cut a few hundred jobs as it shuts down its CDMA handset development.
The company has been developing CDMA (Code-Division Multiple Access) products at a facility in San Diego but is now turning to ODMs (original device manufacturers) for all its CDMA phones. It expects to eliminate about 600 jobs in the process, cutting a work force of about 1,150 to roughly 550, said spokesman Keith Nowak. In the future, the San Diego unit will work with the ODMs and also help to develop Nokia GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) and UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) products.
San Diego is the hometown of Qualcomm Inc., which pioneered CDMA, a technology used mostly in the Americas and South Korea. Nokia, based in Espoo, Finland, has built its mobile phone business primarily around GSM, the dominant technology in Europe and other regions.
In June, Nokia cancelled a plan it hatched with Sanyo in February to jointly form a separate company for CDMA products. The companies abandoned the plan because of changes in the market, Nowak said. Now Nokia plans to end its own CDMA research and development and instead work with third-party hardware vendors to create phones with the Nokia brand and a Nokia-like user interface. The ODM phones won't use Nokia's operating system.
Nokia and Qualcomm recently have been embroiled in legal disputes over patents as a longstanding cross-licensing agreement between them nears expiration. The reorganization in San Diego is unrelated to those squabbles, according to Nowak.
Person of few words I guess...
sfx