www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/comment/guestspeaker/1384538.html
And after billions wasted on 3G, it's going to be replaced by free wireless local area networks, or LANs. A technology that the cell-phone industry is spending untold billions on, 3G promises to deliver high-speed data precisely where you don't need it -- on your phone. On the other hand, homes, offices, coffee shops, airports and hotels are building out cheap and grass-roots wireless local area networks that deliver even higher-speed access where you do need it -- your personal digital assistant and your laptop. I agree with Andy, but he fails to answer the most important question for investors: How can you make money on this? It is well designed, and is now infused in the entire Apple product line. Like so many innovations, the cult of Steve Jobs has been instrumental in pushing "the rest of us" into wireless LANs. But in the end, Apple is just a small proprietary boxmaker. It is profitable, and Intersil is divesting itself of its slow-growth businesses, making it a pure play and developing a strong balance sheet at the same time. I have one installed in my home office, and it is fast, easy and just plain cool. I can drag my laptop anywhere in the house -- including the hammock in my garden -- and never loose one tick of the market data streaming through the T-1 in the basement. And installing my wireless local access network was one of those rare satori-like moments of perfect bliss -- I just plugged it in and it worked. When was the last time a piece of technology did that for you? Sometimes there's a subscription or a connection fee, and sometimes it just works. Because it means that a host of devices -- everything from PocketPCs to cameras, theoretically -- can now support a high-speed wireless connection. Expect to see Intersil's tiny chipset in add-ons for pretty much every PDA format this year. The costs are really quite minimal, and the technology is so simple that it inspires creativity. Community networks are sprouting up all over the place, helping to solve the last-mile problem in cities like Boston and San Francisco. Mister Softee is making a big bet on PocketPCs, TabletPCs and living room domination. There are warts on this frog though, no matter how much of a prince it may be. But remember what happened the last time we had a nearly insecurable open standard in networking -- we ended up with the Internet (God help us all). So this leaves us with a classic convergence problem: For most folks, a tiny, simple phone is all they ever want. For some unknown fraction of consumers, the opposite is true: Their ultimate phone is complex and replaces their PDA. There are many examples of this happening already -- monster screens, Palm operating systems, long-life batteries -- they're all making their way into the hands of early adopters. But do you really want to hold that kind of brick up to your head all day? Worse, do you really need to watch streaming video on a 2-inch screen while you're driving? Alas, this is a case where convergence is doomed, and one-device-per function is where the smart money is. Small will continue to be beautiful in phones, while the shrinking of PDAs will run into ergonomic limits. Like laptops, there is a minimum usable size for PDAs: You need to be able to see the screen, navigate and enter data in some way. And if you plan to get data into your PDA, 3G is just a terrible way to do it. It's not based on open architecture, so things such as instant messaging are extremely difficult to implement. In Europe, more than $70 billion is being spent by carriers just to acquire the spectrum for 3G. Texas Instruments ( 69 TXN:NYSE - 70 news) is so desperate to find a killer application for 3G that it has set up a $100 million venture fund to help companies develop 3G services. So on the one hand, you have the wireless carriers spending billions and billions to build out a mediocre high-speed data network that no one is really sure is in demand. On the other, you have cheap, grass-roots technology that already is solving wireless networking problems that real people have, using open standards and free spectrum. OpenFund strives to be fully invested, expecting to be at least 90% invested under most market conditions. At time of publication, OpenFund was long Microsoft and Intersil, although holdings can change at any time. Guest Speaker 89 A Signal No One Should Ignore 4/2/01 12:50 PM ET The Arms Index hit secular highs on the NYSE and Nasdaq. Guest Speaker 90 A Noticeable Shift in Sentiment 3/24/01 10:00 AM ET For the Nasdaq, it feels like the worst is close at hand, if not already here.
|
http://csua.com/feed/