Since I was at 3GSM and VON, I could not attend CTIA this past week, but a friend gave me some interesting information about 3G developments in China. There was quite a bit of chatter in both New Orleans and Cannes that the 3G licenses in China would finally be issued by the end of 2005. Apparently, China Unicom mentioned that any service provider consolidation or reorganization would be revealed by that time frame. That is why there is an expectation that the first equipment contracts will be issued the end of the year or  the start of 2006.

Nortel (NYSE:NT) was bullish about its 3G chances in China.  The company hopes to leverage their current incumbent position with China Unicom (having roughly a 20% share of the Unicom account) into an EV-DO contract once 3G licenses are issued.  Nortel was also optimistic about taking advantage of its JV with LG to win some more business in South Korea, hoping to benefit from the KTF and the SK Telecom buildouts.

Since I saw Larry Borsato mention some figures in the 99.999% availability requirement-for-VoIP-networks debate, I decided it was time for me to dust off my networking theory book and implement Erlang's formula on an Excel spreadsheet using VBA, to get a better feel for how much each "9" matters.

Here are the results that I got:

Again, in Greg Galitzine's example, a Verizon bureaucrat's two plus days delay in dispatching a technician to handle the case resulted in service availability going down from 99.999% to under 99.5%... wow! - how quickly that number can fall!