Michael Ching, communications equipment industry analyst at Merrill Lynch, took some time last week to talk about cellphones and the infrastructure that makes telecommunications possible.
The Market Watch column last Sunday, about possible bargains among telecommunications stocks, misstated the investment position of the Third Avenue Funds in a basket of eight issues that it found attractive.
Instead, he named other areas where he saw possible breakthroughs: energy, telecommunications, and e-commerce, all of which have changed radically since the regulations were drafted, in the early nineties.
Modems thus make it possible for established telecommunications media to support a wide variety of data communication, such as e-mail between personal computers, facsimile transmission between fax machines, or the downloading of audio-video files from a World Wide Web server to a home computer.
The idea that the actions of one person in a boat could have snarled Internet access for an entire region seems outlandish, but it's quite possible, according to telecommunications analysts in this country.
He said there is scarcely an industrial building in Jersey City, even such unlikely candidates as two abandoned former cold storage warehouses, that have not been studied as a possible data center and telecommunications locations.
The transmission speed of the fabricated OLEDs was also examined for possible application in interactive telecommunications.
While the companies mentioned in the reports played down speculation that they were negotiating or declined to comment, analysts were quickly redrawing the possible map of the United States telecommunications industry.
But now that Lucent is the apparent target of a possible $34 billion merger with French telecommunications giant Alcatel the American scientific institution could become a subsidiary of a French company.
Even more important, the current battle gives us an alarming glimpse of the possible shape of the future in telecommunications.
