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BERNARD LO INTERVIEWS PERRY LAFORGE ON BLOOMBERG TV
JUNE 4, 2009
SPEAKERS: PERRY LAFORGE
BERNARD LO, BLOOMBERG NEWS
(This is not a legal transcript. Bloomberg LP cannot guarantee its accuracy.)
BERNARD LO, BLOOMBERG NEWS: Lets talk to Perry LaForge who represents the constituents in the code division multiple access. That's a long, long strewn out way of saying CDMA industry, which vies against GSM.
And in the Chinese context against their locally grown TDS CDMA. Hello, Perry. Great to see you.
PERRY LAFORGE, CHAIRMAN, CDMA DEVELOPMENT GROUP: Great to see you.
LO: 300 million 3G phones - 300 million. That would be - they already have - that would be like one of every four Chinese with 3G access.
LAFORGE: Well, the migration from 2G to 3G continues. And with a license allocation in China - it's starting to happen. So the numbers are going to be big.
LO: Are they done fine tuning and cleaning up their act? Because it wasn't too long ago that they stuck company A, and company B, company C, the D together.
LAFORGE: Well, that still takes some time to settle down. That looks like things are starting hit in stride. So I was just in Beijing yesterday and we were talking with China Telecom and they've got plans for close to 100 million subscribers in a couple of years. So a big chunk of that is 3G.
LO: What's the thrust of that? What's the onus? What's the catalyst for doing that? You can - can't most people get by with 2, 2.5 edge? Rather than go to full blown 3G? Or is it something -
LAFORGE: Well, I think everybody's getting used to faster and faster data rates and when you go beyond - when you get exposure to those faster data rates - I think connectivity some of these interesting applications you want it.
So, with more and more applications like that people are pushing for 3G.
LO: Now, lets talk about the different platforms because to a lot of consumers they don't really know the difference between CDMA, TDS-CDMA, and the various different technologies.
Basically they just want something that connects, doesn't drop, and...