Thanks for those links C2. It is now 6 years since OFDM first reared its head at Auckland University's Electrical Engineering department and I dragged it out into daylight for the SI sleuths to analyze.
Since then, OFDM has made progress. But it's still not commercial and the advantages in mobile cyberphones are obviously not as great as those of CDMA over GSM and look how hard it has been for CDMA to defeat GSM. GSM is STILL totally dominant in the cellphone world, if not the cyberphone world, a decade later.
So, in the wide area network world, [the short-range WiFi world being completely different], I can't see OFDM defeating CDMA any time soon. Especially when the cost of spectrum is small compared with the total costs paid by subscribers to enjoy cyberphone services, and the savings with OFDM are smaller still.
To use a cyberphone for a year costs, right now, in New Zealand, something like US$1000 a year for the gadget and some data and minutes [not unlimited use, just reasonable, frugal use]. The cost of the spectrum is small - in NZ Vodafone acquired 15 MHz [5 each way, plus another 5 to spare] for US$1 million in 2002. Even in Europe, $100 billion bid for 10MHz of 2GHz spectrum, divided by the population, is only about $500 per person [assuming 200 million likely subscribers], which is about $100 a year = small compared with the retail prices of phones and services.
Yet we still hear whining about QUALCOMM's royalties, which is amazing given that QUALCOMM has enabled all that value to be created.
QUALCOMM's royalty is about 5% on the wholesale price of the device. So per subscriber, QUALCOMM's royalty is only about $20 for a swanky cyberphone. Phones last for about 2 years, so that's $10 a year, yet subscribers are paying $1000 a year and spectrum is $100 a year. QUALCOMM left a LOT of money on the table. Okay, those figures are very rough and a lot of subscribers pay a lot less than $1000 a year [I'm spending only about $300 a year on service, and my device lasts 2 or 3 years].
QUALCOMM's royalty is trivial. I don't think people will be switching to OFDM to avoid QUALCOMM's royalty, though of course that will form a small part of the calculations.
Mqurice |
