Wide area OFDM networks have been adopted much slower than I thought. It is now a decade since OFDM started looming as a competitive threat and it's still insignificant in wide area networks. EV-DO as planned by Andrew Viterbi is going well. HSPA as kludged by the GSM Guild is making good headway now, albeit an expensive technology, with Qualcomm doing a lot of the propulsion with top notch ASICs doing the turbo-charging.
Yes, OFDM provides more bits per hertz per second than does CDMA, but it is hardly "blowing CDMA out of the water" though it does indeed blow TDMA technologies out of the water and analogue technologies too.
One of the big lessons over the last 13 years has been that spectrum efficiency is of little consequence compared with all the other imposts encumbering the subscribers locked up in walled gardens by politicians and "service" providers.
That's why the highly spectrally inefficient GSM Guild managed to hold the line against CDMA for so long, keeping subscribers hostage to the vast scam perpetrated against them for so long. Spectrum is just one comparatively minor aspect of providing mobile phone service.
Calling CDMA a "kludge" is so inaccurate that it speaks of a bias you have against CDMA for some reason. I am unaware of any way CDMA can be called a kludge, other than everything has compromises to try to find an optimum solution, but that's an abuse of the meaning of the word.
Flarion certainly hasn't turned into a roaring success, or even a significant success. We Qualcomm shareholders are very used to a $billion here and a $billion there going down the gurgler of some new bright idea with little or no return -
SnapTrack
Wireless Knowledge
724 Solutions
Wingcast
Vesper
Pegaso
Globalstar
Flarion
NetZero
Eudora
Graviton
AirFiber
So we aren't shocked when another $billion goes awol.
There have been some "strategic investment" successes, such as PayPal, Phone.com and others that don't come to mind right now. I don't know whether PacketVideo was good or not for Qualcomm, but NextWave has it now and it seems to be doing good things.
Now we spend a $billion at a time on legal dramas. Thank goodness that the basic business is sound, so far, though Neelie and the gang will do it in if they get a chance. USA politicians had better defend it.
I don't see why, if Qualcomm has one claim of one patent which is essential to OFDM in WiMAX or LTE, they need to accept any lower royalty than the standard 5% or so which they have claimed until now. It's not a matter of patent counting. As Broadcom showed, one poxy little obvious patent which they bought for a song in a job lot is enough to charge a fortune and hold up a huge industry.
Perhaps Qualcomm has not been so naive this time as to hand over the crown jewels for a token payment.
Perhaps NextWave already has a licence to use Qualcomm patents. They don't appear on this list:
qualcomm.com
Mqurice |
