Again, Maurice, in your eagerness to rush to the defense of your beloved Qualcomm, you failed to notice that my remark about Qualcomm's proven tendency to promise more than what it can deliver regarding CDMA technology was a direct response to Eric's query asking for more proof.
No amount of mildly amusing sophistry on your part can obscure the following items from that 1996 WSJ article alone:
He and others at Qualcomm claimed CDMA offered 20 to 40 times the capacity of traditional analog-cellular systems.
In December 1991, he told the industry press that all questions about CDMA "have been put to rest," a statement since updated and amended with several CDMA "improvements."
In January 1992, Dr. Jacobs claimed CDMA would be commercially available in 12 months, a timeline about 40 months off. "I was overly optimistic," he says.
There are more, but the essential point is made. Over-optimism may get very smart people out of a jam every now and then but the pattern remains the same and works against them over time. For proof of that, look at the way that CDG continues to maintain on its website that CDMAOne provides 4x to 5x the capacity of GSM or TDMA. This flies in the face of recent statements made by the likes of Verizon (3x the capacity) and totally ignores the capacity upgrades available to a GSM or TDMA operator.
More importantly, you missed the point about the importance of vendor credibility in a global industry like telecommunications which is undergoing wrenching deregulatory changes. Could QCOM's own big mouth perhaps be a factor in all the reversals it has encountered over the years?
Lastly, your attempt to correlate the cost of spectrum with the cost of royalties is curious, to say the least. It is now clear that there will be countries that will adopt the auction method (USA, UK, Germany, etc) while others will adopt the beauty contest method (Japan, France, China, etc), where spectrum is allocated to the fittest.
You're not suggesting that there is only one way to allocate spectrum, are you?
Take a look at how the Europeans, for example, are using wireless to create a multiplier effect throught its regional economy. It goes without saying that their heavily fragmented analog patchwork networks provided the impetus for them to harmonize their spectrum and coalesce around one technology: GSM, GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA, 4G, etc...
Given the culturally-rich but violent history of the European continental shelf, who is the idiot who will try to disrupt that kind of connectivity cohesion in the name of some convenient view of competition?
The vision: a world of radio-enabled mobile and wearable devices that talk to each other and to the Net, perhaps controlled by some sort of electronic pen or wand that may one day serve as a universal communications remote control for any appliance in the home, office or car........
"......Today's Internet infrastructure is just not good enough to support reliability, quality-of-service and durability needed for mobile communications. It's unacceptable," said Ilkka Pukkila, director of 3G strategic marketing at Nokia Networks.
Because a majority of the routers used in the Internet backbone today are not designed for wireless services, they tend to take far too long for routing and may drop packets, he added. "We have to build a lot of mobile-aware nodes in the network by adding higher-speed routing and service platforms to the current infrastructure," said Pukkila, an effort he said is "almost like building a highway on top of the Internet."
To tame conflicting air interfaces, Nokia is working on development of "one common resource manager," to be designed into a network to harmonize incompatible interfaces between a radio network controller network and packet subsystem. The idea is to provide interstandard handover so that service continuity can be maintained over heterogeneous networks, explained Pukkila.
Despite the hurdles for coming 3G broadband wireless nets, packet-switched data is already becoming available on today's narrowband phones. "We are not waiting for the wideband standard to fully perfect the bandwidth issue," said Nokia's Hayrynen. Even with limited data speed, "We are enhancing hardware to make things happen in a practical manner."
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