Iridium Doesn't Figure on Motorola's Bottom Line; Q1 Detail.
Motorola Inc says it owns 18% of the Iridium satellite phone venture and says its equity investment has been written off with a $50m charge taken in its first quarter. When it will begin to recognize any Iridium profit in its quarterly statements depends on its evaluation of the...

Phone.com Sees Royalty-Free Browser As Way to Propagate WAP.
Phone.com Inc, one of the founders of the wireless application protocol (WAP) forum, is trying to propagate the use of the internet data transport mechanism for mobile phones through the licensing policy for its UP.Browser WAP microbrowser. Hitachi Ltd is the latest company to sign up to use Redwood...

Samsung Introduces Home-Grown MCU for Portable Devices.
Samsung Electronics Co has introduced a new RISC semiconductor design it says will make the firm less dependent on foreign imports for circuit designs and form the basis of a range of new portable digital products. The new design uses an 8-bit RISC core, dubbed CalmRISC, embedded into a...

Wireless Application Protocol 1.1: WAP Comes of Age.
By Rachel Chalmers The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum has announced the release of its WAP version 1.1 specification. Using WAP v.1.1, users of digital mobile phones and other wireless devices should be able to get information directly and securely from the internet or intranets. The WAP...

China Unicom to Set Up Nationwide Internet Operation.
China Unicom is in the process of setting up China's first nationwide ISP, which it is calling Uninet, as it positions itself to become the country's top telecoms operator following the breakup of ex-monopoly China Telecom into four companies. The State Council recently approved Unicom to be...

Japanese Firms Demonstrate W-CDMA Mobile Devices.
Wireless device prototypes demonstrated at the Business Show '99 show in Tokyo this week show how serious Japanese companies are about getting behind W-CDMA broadband mobile networks. NTT DoCoMo (NTT Mobile Communications Network Inc) is piloting the digital broadband technology in Japan and hopes to introduce the first networks...

Palm Looks to Low-End With IIIe Handheld.
Palm Computing is looking to capture the low-end with the release of its new $229 handheld device, the Palm IIIe. Andrea Johnson, product manager for the series, said that the 3Com Corp subsidiary was trying to attract a younger consumer audience with the stripped down version of the Palm...

Turbo-coding of coherence multiplexed optical PPM CDMA system with balanced detection.
Abstract: The effects of turbo-coding on the coherence multiplexed optical PPM CDMA systems are shown by evaluating bit error rate (BER) with respect to system parameters such as interleaver length (K), number of simultaneous users (N), code length (f), initial pulsewidth (t0) and normalized threshold ([theta]) by including the...

A switching mechanism detection to reduce complexity in multiuser detection for DS-CDMA systems.
Abstract: We present a reduced complexity switching mechanism which uses either matched filter or Parallel Interference Cancellation (PIC) detector based on channel characteristics. The main criterion of taking PIC detector is that it has less Bit Error Rate (BER) and less processing delay than other nonlinear multiuser detectors. This...

Mobile services roll out in Iraq; For so long denied access to a mobile telephone network, Iraq has three providers and much to discuss.
Finally after a lengthy period of contractual and political squabbling, mobile telephone services in Iraq commenced operations in February 2004. This follows the award of regional mobile contracts--a first for the Middle East, where national mobile licences are the norm to three consortia in December 2003 (see table 1)....