27 May 2002

Simon Bowers on Vodafone's impending £25bn write-down Another reason for being bearish on any telco stock where large sums were paid for spectrum is that there isn't a genuine scarcity of radio spectrum out there, so no need to have paid huge license fees. The only reason spectrum appears to be a scarce resource is that we're setting policy as if we had only 30s technology still. David Reed is the man on this score. However, don't expect the FCC to go away any time soon - the vested interests for FCC, govts and the telcos are just too high. 6:10:58 PM     comments

These days, the chicken leg is a rare dish: Network testing the Verizon way 60 men drive around the US with bootfuls of mobiles in their blacked-out, fully-antennaed-up station wagons. The mobiles autodial a server, play a series of Dada prerecorded sentences (designed to include everyday speech patterns whilst giving a good measure of audio quality) and a server listens to the signal on Verizon's and some competitor networks. Rodcorp says: Heath Robinson. Verizon rebuts: "The clock struck two to mark the third period". 6:06:28 PM     comments