People aren't ignoring engineer, they are trying to guess how much advantage ofdm will have, and when. As shown by cdma, these things are not a no-brainer slam dunk.
Real people, namely Clark, did calculations a decade ago [in SI] to get the advantage of ofdm over cdma. It wasn't a spectacular theoretical advantage. So it is proving to be.
Sprint and Clearwire made great play but fell short. Globalstar is also going to be great some time. But people can lose a lot of money on the road to Nirvana.
Even if ofdm is a great success, it doesn't mean all the companies involved in it will also be great successes. Look at the carnage in gsm and cdma - many promising companies fell by the wayside. Look at L M Ericsson [now Sony-Ericsson], Motorola [once the number one world champion], Philips Electronics, [they gave up]. Picking the gum-boot maker as the cellphone world champion wasn't an obvious bet.
With ofdm now looming, and pulsed monocycles another option, cdma does indeed have competition. But how long that life cycle will last is a tough guess. If it's another 20 years, it wouldn't surprise me. GSM will have had a 20 year innings despite cdma being only a few years behind with a huge spectrum advantage.
OFDM is booming in Wi-Fi and I have invested, and lost, a lot of money in that sphere, so it's not that I'm anti-ofdm. My more recent investment in Zenbu zenbu.net.nz is turning out just fine and that can adopt WiMAX too.
Let's not ignore patents - WiMAX needs access to technology. One claim of one patent can sink things, as Qualcomm found. We have had years of argument about how Qualcomm's derisory royalty was stopping cdma, which was always a ridiculous assertion but plenty of people claimed to believe it. Presumably they think the same argument applies to ofdm in WiMAX, though we don't hear them making that argument with their extorquerationate W-CDMA royalties.
Mqurice |
