M, best not to trust my judgement [or you'd have lost a bundle on Globalstar and have been surprised by how far QUALCOMM's share price dropped from its peak]. I recommend using your own judgement, perhaps with some guesswork by me as a starting point for your own considerations.
I'm pleased when people consider what I write and correct the blunders, ignorance and misunderstanding. It saves my bacon. A few times, SI people have saved my skin by pointing out faulty thinking.
Meanwhile, here's the CDMA Development Group link for the cdma2000 developments: cdg.org The one you gave was for all CDMA.
QUALCOMM has quite sensibly put a lot of effort into developing W-CDMA technology because it was potentially a huge market. That depended on the W-CDMA crowd getting their act together in a timely manner without being greedy on royalties. The W-CDMA people have failed as Ben has pointed out with many posts informing us about the pathetic progress in the GSM Guild [GG].
Meanwhile, QUALCOMM has got their W-CDMA project up and more or less running, but they can't complete things until GG gets their part of it right. If anyone can make W-CDMA hum, it's QUALCOMM. But that defeats the whole point of VW-40, other than the delaying tactic which was wildly successful - the GSM service providers and governments were sucked into believing the GG that there really would be something soon.
If QUALCOMM is the company with the ASICs which work and collects the same royalties, why would Nokia and co want VW-40 to turn into a real product which will ruin their cellphone market share? While GSM hangs on, Nokia will be King Kong of the handset business, which is making them $$billions.
When cdma2000 takes over, they'll be an also-ran behind Samsung and probably others.
It would have been risky for QUALCOMM to assume that W-CDMA would fail and to ignore it as a technology. Now, QUALCOMM has got W-CDMA covered as well as cdma2000. It's a bit of a checkmate for the GG. QUALCOMM also has multimode, multiband radioOne, gpsOne, BREW, Technicolor and other stuff lined up.
With a GSM1x network, a subscriber could buy a QUALCOMM-powered device which would work in GSM mode when out of range of the expanding cdma2000 networks and switch to the good stuff when in range of cdma2000.
So, what's the merit in rolling out W-CDMA in 2GHz? Why not just build GSM1x in 800MHz? Or 450MHz for that matter. Thanks to QUALCOMM's great technology, the high capacity of 1xRTT networks and further capacity developments which are well-proven, will boost capacity so much that 800MHz conversions could make 2GHz irrelevant for a while.
We'll see.
Mqurice |
