The governments in Western Europe just seized 50 billion euros for 3G spectrum. The used the money from the telecom companies to pay off the national debts 3 years before WCDMA is to become a commercial reality. That's not a whole lotta love there.
How can you so blindly accept the success of a technology that has never made a commercial debut. This is no longer about economic protectionism - it's about economic survival. Everyone knows that GPRS and WCDMA is an inferior approach to 3G. QCOM is tyrying to make an acceptable compromise by harmonizing CDMA2000 and WCDMA into a single technology. Hell, they even made it compatible with GPRS so everyone could still participate in the game.
By the time WCDMA happens in 2 years in Europe, the rest of the world will have 3G CDMA2000 fully positioned in the 1.25 MHZ networks - Japan, the US, Korea, South America, China, India, etc... At that point, they will be expanding the narrowband CDMA2000 networks into 5 MHZ networks.
The issue of spectrum is a serious level of confusion for people. GSM companies have insisted that 3G is defined by the bandwidth of the spectrum, not the efficiency of applications that exist within the system. They have snowed people into thinking that 1xEV is not a 3G technology since it is not yet standardized for 5 MHZ spectrum requirements. QCOM will take care of that issue soon enough.
GSM carriers will be attempting to upgrade an inferior GPRS GSM network to WCDMA running at 40 kbps when the rest of the world is going to clip along at 2.4 MBPS. In economic terms, Jacobs has clearly demonstrated the cost advantage to be $0.02 per minute for CDMA2000 vs. $0.40 for GPRS.
It's a game of global pressure on profit margins. NOK's only resistance to QCOM's technology so far pertains to profit margins, not patents. As they cave in to the same rules governing every other telecom company under the sun, 1xEV and WCDMA will both have an opportunity to compete in Europe. |
